Abstract
In late September 2022, the Biden administration was reportedly in negotiations with the management team from TikTok to address national security concerns surrounding Chinese ownership, data security, and governance. However, after nearly a year, negotiations remain at an impasse over US demands for changes in TikTok’s ownership to possibly include a forced sale to a US-owned firm. These geopolitical concerns highlight the critical importance of emergent scholarship surrounding the accelerated rise, platform power, and cultural and political influence of TikTok, amongst others.
Within this context, in TikTok: Creativity and Culture in Short Video, authors D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye, Jing Zeng, and Patrik Wikström provide a detailed account of TikTok framed within the ‘short video industry’. This industry refers to a raft of platforms that emerged in the 2010s in the wake of fast Internet services and smartphone advancements distinguished by their visually rich content that foster new practices of online creativity and manifest new forms of culture. The rise of these platforms were further amplified by the COVID-19 crisis and the increased demand for online sociability.
In their history of the short video industry, the authors map a decade-long effort to advance short-form video platforms. This history lays the groundwork for how TikTok has excelled in the introduction and/or distinctive combination of numerous platform features. Such features include the ‘socially creative’ (pp. 64–70) that promotes interactivity between users, unique in-app video creation and editing functions, alongside features found in comparable platforms. The consequence is a platform that excels as a music-centric mobile short-video platform.
What also distinguishes TikTok, as with other social media platforms, is the ability for users to engage online communities around mutual interests. Combined, these distinctive features of TikTok have resulted not only in the accelerated uptake of the service, but also the emergence of a new wave of creators – social media entrepreneurs – generating revenue from their ability to create community on these platforms by successfully harnessing the features of the platforms. The platform affords diverse business models that have allowed TikTok creators to become vital stakeholders in the emergent, rapidly growing creator economy. In addition to commercial gain, TikTok users and creators engage in novel forms of participatory cultural activism, more often aligned with the interests of progressive political, social, and identity movements. The authors also map an array of challenges the platform faces around complex issues over platform governance, like those referenced in the first paragraph.
The platform-centricity of the book does pose some limitations in the analysis. For example, the largest TikTokers driving attention and time spent by users on the platform are also building communities across multiple platforms with alternative modalities such as longform or livestreaming video, text, images, and audio. TikTok master Zach King, for example, was once at the top of the leader board on the now defunct Vine platform and built channels and posted content to engage a massive global community across a half-dozen services and sites.
The authors briefly discuss the competition posed by other tech behemoths, including YouTube shorts and Instagram reels. Despite emulating TikTok’s short-form modality, these powerful competitors have yet to pose a serious threat to TikTok’s continued growth. Notably, their failure to compete arguably lies in TikTok’s key design feature that could have been featured even more centrally in this book to better distinguish the platform. TikTok’s owner, Bytedance, has placed ‘the algorithm above all else’ (pp. 46–8) to enhance their ‘recommender system and other AI-related technologies’ (p. 21) across all their platforms, which has helped advance their national and global aspirations. Mentioned but once is Xigua, Bytedance’s long-form video platform comparable to YouTube, which dominates the Chinese market, particularly in tier-3 and above cities, due in part to comparable use of their AI-driven recommender systems. To their credit, in advancing their vision for the future of TikTok, Kaye et al. describe how TikTok’s competitors may prove more viable, if they can ‘reverse-engineer’ their platform’s algorithmic recommender systems. This further illustrates the critical competitive advantage of Bytedance’s platform, regardless of video modality. In fact, just this past year, TikTok allowed users to post videos up to 10 minutes in length.
Nonetheless, as a contribution to the growing canon of platform-focused texts, TikTok offers a vital account of the distinctive technological features driving online creativity and contributing to the platform’s cultural and commercial success. In turn, this book should align with the interest of scholars, students, users, and creators. As the authors affirm, whether TikTok’s success proves ephemeral or not in the longer history of the platform-based creator economy remains to be seen but the ‘strange and beautiful world of short-video creativity and culture will endure and evolve’ (p. 202).