“Are you Tik-Toking?”
“No”
“Yes you are”
“…”
I joined TikTok on the day my first client shut.
A few days before, I’d laughed at a video, shared over on Instagram, a parody of the total denial the UK seemed to be in at the time. I sang Break My Stride (ironically) as I stayed home and batch cooked food for the freezer.
By Monday, I’d had bad news after bad news call. I love chatting away to people on the phone, but that day, seeing a client’s name flash up on my phone screen was likely to mean losing that job. By the afternoon, the phone calls were making me recoil. My honeymoon was cancelled. Best friends’ weddings hung in the balance. Everything I was looking forward to this year, including a steady income, had vanished in the space of a day.
In the evening, I remembered how much that TikTok video had made me laugh. I also remembered seeing Candice Braithwaite make some utterly brilliant TikToks and share them to her Instagram. I set about finding this hallowed platform. I downloaded the app, unsure how to search for just a song title and feeling the full extent of being born in the 80s (just).
Thankfully, like some MTV2 magic from yesteryear (where that one music video you wanted to see would eventually come on the rotation, if you watched for long enough and hoped hard enough), it came up. I laughed my head off at the coincidence of finding it, in this sea of absurdity.
The next day, when a low hour hit, I opened up the app again… this time I was greeted by hundreds of potatoes recreating a scene from an Adele concert sang along in unison to Someone Like You. Then by a joke where someone walks around somewhere empty (anywhere!) singing Redbone’s Come And Get Your Love and pretends someone is singing back to them. And then a stuffed toy unicorn dancing in a make-shift club with Monopoly thrown down around it. My favourite meme so far is the Can I Pet That Dog meme, because it speaks to the person I am right now. I had to be banned from shouting it all day every day by my new co-worker (my husband).
I’m not the only recent convert. TikTok saw an 18 per cent rise week-on-week in downloads in the United States last month (16-22 March), according to a report in Music Business Worldwide. We are about to get obsessed - as seen in the number of downloads estimated by Sensor Tower for Italy, which has been under government-mandated lockdown since 9 March.
Sensor Tower estimates the app was downloaded 237,000 times last month (16-22 March) in Italy, which represented a 35 per cent increase compared to the prior week (9-15 March).
While the streets are so quiet and there are no crowds to get lost in, I love the sensory overload that comes from being blasted with this app’s budget-at-best Eurotrash pop chosen by users, or the on-purpose hilariously-DIY covers of a rap song someone’s sung to their own TikTok video.
The inner narrative and micro visual jokes within TikTok are the most compelling thing about this app - and why its humour is so apt for now. Those gags ping from user to user as undercurrent humour: a joke gets made, the next day it’s been subverted, and so on. Because we’re all stuck doing the same thing right now, and public mood has changed so rapidly from week to week, these running jokes morph across the app like a wonderfully chaotic call-and-response.
My friends are cautious. When they’ve checked in with me for the last week, all I’ve been able to give them as a status update is “wElL I’M pReTtY InTo tIkToK rIgHt nOw So tHaT’s tAkInG uP aLl oF mY tImE”.
Facebook has never been a platform for self-reflexive humour. Instagram and catty comments don’t come off well in translation. Twitter is another mess entirely. But if you’re missing the office gossip or just a family to moan about, WELCOME TO A WHOLE NEW WORLD MY FRIENDS. Have you caught up with the Karen memes? Have you seen everyone’s Dad inexplicably be persuaded to do a dance routine to The Weeknd’s Blinding Lights? Well then.
Most of all, I love that I don’t have to participate in this to enjoy it. I do not get notifications. I don’t have an account, and I have absolutely no desire to create my own video - neither am I told I need to, in order to be engaged. I don’t feel the need to like anyone’s post or comment. Unlike every other social media account that demands my attention, no one’s content is that compelling on here that I feel the need to ‘follow’ or endorse them. I’m quite happy letting everyone do their own weirdo things ad infinitum, thanks very much.
I love the family in-jokes none of us can get just as much as the well-thought-out gags. I love the humblebrags and glimpses into people’s ultra posh homes just as much as the super low budget pranks. Endless covers of Phineas and Ferb’s ’Dude, we’re getting the band back together’ introductions to people’s sprawling family members now awkwardly stuck in quarantine under one roof that I never have to see again.
It’s those kinds of videos that make me think now is the perfect time to join. There’s an absurdist mood that’s taken over the app, with so many of its users stuck inside. The content creators I’m accustomed to seeing clogging up Instagram’s algorithm don’t get so much room here, and instead there’s a llama dancing to The Notorious B.I.G’s Hypnotize and a concert of gummy bears singing The Killer’s Mr Brightside on the floor of someone’s kitchen. I love it ALL. However. If your dance routine doesn’t involve a begrudging parent, it shouldn’t be going online.
The non-stop variety and sheer range in the production value of content mean its by far the most absorbing app I have on my phone. I am currently restricted to two TiKToK sessions a day, as per my exchange with my ‘coworker’ at the start of the post. I relish every second of strangers doing stupid stuff for attention. Play on.