Abstract
Fingers on buzzers, your quiz starter for 10. What connects a Harry Potter illusion, Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams song and the war in Ukraine? Ten points if you identified these TikTok trends! Unless you’ve been hiding under a digital rock, you might have become aware of the burgeoning influence of TikTok, the video-focused social media app. Owned by Chinese tech company ByteDance, TikTok has become the social media app of choice for my students and indeed Gen Z (cohorts born in the generation from mid-late 1990s to 2010s).
Traditionally, the news agenda has been delivered by mainstream media via print, TV and radio. However, the 21st century has witnessed new tech entrants. Initially, we witnessed the emergence of Facebook in 2004, Twitter in 2006, Instagram in 2010 and TikTok in 2017. Will this be the last contender? It won’t be too long before a new social media app shakes up the status quo.
The power of the new social media lies in its ability for items (both serious news and light comedic pieces) to gain traction very quickly – in other words, propensity to trend or to meme. The term meme itself (from ancient Greek mimeme, meaning “imitated”) was introduced by the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. He blended mimeme with gene to give us meme.
So how do school-age children consume news? From my experience as a teacher, unless they are significantly influenced by parents, they don’t watch terrestrial TV, read physical newspapers or listen to the radio. Pre-Covid (and even now), schools regularly show CBBC’s Newsround’s bulletin briefs. As it comes from a trusted source like the BBC, teachers have sufficient confidence in this TV news magazine for it to be projected into our classroom screens.
Pre-Covid, this might have been the only way a schoolchild consumed news. Teachers were also aware that students would use social media in their own time, primarily for light entertainment: Instagram and TikTok for shorter content, and YouTube for longer-form videos. After the first lockdown in March 2020, TikTok boomed in usage, when many people found themselves with idle fingers to scroll. In the early days of lockdown, it was dance trends, song imitations and cute animals that formed the majority of TikTok consumption.
Russian president Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24 changed this dynamic. The war prompted an outpouring of support for Ukrainians from the British people. School children in particular wanted to understand what was going on, and why. They turned to what they understood for answers: social media, and particularly TikTok.
Even my youngest brother Tommy started using his TikTok account (@ tommyseagull) to create short videos with titles such as “Klitschko fights for Ukraine”, “What is NATO?” and “Why Putin wants war?”. Searching for hashtags such as #UkraineTikTok, #LearnOnTikTok and #LearnWithTikTok gave viewers the ability to watch brief explainer videos.
I know my brother did his utmost to ensure the accuracy of the content of his one-minute videos. However, young people scrolling through their feed are unlikely to authenticate the credibility, even if some content creators were spreading misinformation. Established mainstream media outlets such as ITV News, The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph followed trailblazers such as The Washington Post on to TikTok, but it was only the war in Ukraine that catalysed BBC News to join the app.
After weekly clamour from my own students to join TikTok, I’ve recently joined. I’m sticking to what I know best in the first instance: maths. I’m creating #MathsTok (TikTok for maths) before I branch out into other areas, such as topical news. Lazy stereotypes can label young people as narcissistic and caring only about their immediate environment. My own experience in the classroom suggests otherwise. Young people do care, and often deeply, about the world around them. They haven’t felt able to use mainstream media to understand or express this.
TikTok has become an outlet for them to consume and even create intelligent content. It has inspired some of my students to read actual physical books (classics such as Austen or Dickens, no less) based purely on TikTok recommendations (#BookTok). Recently, on BBC Breakfast, I even explained a new trend where TikTok creators livestream themselves while they study, and my pupils are using this at home as a virtual study buddy in the background.
As young people mature, they tend to consume more traditional media. But we can’t assume this will always be the case. Consuming news on the likes of Instagram and TikTok is here to stay, especially for the younger generations. While social media can sometimes result in us scrolling past videos of cats dancing to Abba songs, its power of communicating important issues of the day in quick, catchy videos is too good to ignore.
