Reality TV Merges with Social Media

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TikTok users are no longer just excited, twirling teenagers; TikTok concerns everyone. Océane Herrero notes that there is no sphere of society that is spared from the TikTok effect: "Fishmongers are on TikTok; dermatologists, karting fans, prisoners, makeup lovers, and, of course, dancers, who were among the first to take over the platform and have largely contributed to its notoriety. Within the confines of their vertical screens, new TikTok users have learned to share their talents and emotions, slices of life lasting a few seconds, sometimes absurd, sometimes stupid, sometimes deeply personal."

Its main function is to promote the creation of viral content; short videos, humorous skits, informal choreographies, 1000 mobile number database that have in common self-mockery, exhibitionism, a self-staging whose stated goal is to capture attention and make money. TikTok is an attention aggregator, it allows you to accumulate the most precious commodity for its subscribers: popularity.

Facebook and Instagram personalize their news feeds using the traces we leave on the web. Social networks are an echo chamber of our most contradictory desires, they follow our trails through the magic of deep learning and the feedback loop . TikTok goes further. It inspires behaviors, shapes attitudes and habits. It directs conduct. We should talk about a "regime" rather than an application, a regime of vision and verification. It doesn't connect individuals, it structures communities. It's a fusion of reality TV and social networks. "The TikTok algorithm is both your jealous ex and your authoritarian father ," summarizes a user interviewed by Océane Herrero. "Facebook and Instagram know our external lives; TikTok, our internal lives."

To paraphrase Marx's words about commodities , TikTok "appears at first glance to be something trivial and self-explanatory. But it is a very complex thing, full of metaphysical subtleties and theological quibbles."

A world in itself
TikTok creates a global space in which everyone is invited to "perform" in the dual sense of performance and self-production. Users don't just invent choreographies; they create a global social relationship mediated not by images, as in traditional spectacle society, but by streams of videos that spread like viruses. Its energy is no longer simply the imitation of models, but the viral contagion of looks. We are witnessing a new form of life scripting, where every situation can be interpreted as entertainment, and where every video can become a meme, a joke. Dance and music play the role of a universal language.

TikTok creates its own social hierarchy according to its own criteria, a society unto itself with its own habits, values, laws, and ideal types. Its key words are authenticity and spontaneity, but TikTok also favors their opposites: calculation, cunning, and duplicity. It relies on acquired influence and claimed transgression. It's a world unto itself with its own codes, impenetrable to other ordinary people.

The realm of influence even has its counter-society, its "alters" who refuse to play the game of trends, and its dissidents, the "désinfluenceurs," who influence in reverse by discrediting this or that expensive and overrated product. TikTok is not a simple mirror of real life; it configures an independent social universe, creates its own language, defines its criteria for belonging, and imposes the law of the celebrity market. It has its own social elevator; it doesn't rely solely on consumers; it creates creators—influencers who are the captains of industry in the attention economy.

There is a TikTok community that transcends geographical and linguistic boundaries, national histories, and shares the unwavering quest for popularity. The ranking of the best TikTokers isn't based on a particular profile, any particular talent, or even on the originality of their content, but on their ability to capture attention through the emergence of the bizarre and the incongruous, the exhibition of the intimate and the unspoken.

Success on TikTok isn't based on any external hierarchy: neither social class, nor educational attainment, nor even ethnic or religious origin. The only law of this TikTok-likeness is the accumulation of subscriber capital, in which the credit is backed not by a reserve currency, but by a stock of attention.

“Building an influencer community is very similar to building a new country from scratch,” said Alex Zhu, the former president of TikTok. “At the beginning of that new country, you have to build a very centralized economy. That means the distribution of wealth has to be concentrated among a small percentage of its population. You have to make sure they successfully build an audience, and a fortune. That makes them role models. And that effectively creates an American dream.”