art-in-the-age

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As the Coronavirus pandemic has unfolded across the globe, many young people have turned to social media as a means of escapism and a place to forge connections in the absence of physical contact. One beneficiary of this influx of homebound new-users was TikTok, an app that had a small but loyal following of primarily Gen-Zers prior to the pandemic. TikTok is the poster child for a new age of social media, one in which content is fed to users primarily through algorithms, rather than chronologically or on a feed of followed users. By tailoring the content shown to appeal to the interests of the user, TikTok can keep users engaged with the app for long periods of time. This content is displayed on the algorithmically generated For You Page, which will continue providing content for as long as the user scrolls. As users flocked to the app, so followed the development of unique subcultures within the app. This development could be compared to that of another social media platform, Tumblr, across the years 2011-2015. Tumblr takes the format of a microblogging platform, on which users curate images and texts on their own page, a blog with its own distinct URL. Creation of original content was not a prerequisite for participation on Tumblr, and blogs could generate a decent amount of attention just by republishing, or “reblogging”, as it was called, content created by other users. The platform served as a birthplace for certain styles and a large amount of discourse, especially centered around politics, mental health, and LGBTQ identities. This discourse is less endemic of Tumblr as a platform, but rather reflective of the needs of the primarily-adolescent users, demonstrated by the fact that nearly all of the discourse present on Tumblr has been replicated by TikTok users years later. The primary difference between the two platforms is not the content of the discourse, but rather the mechanism through which users contribute to it. TikTok lacks Tumblr’s reposting capabilities, and requires its users to post video content if they wish to contribute to a conversation or community, often depicting the user’s face or entire body. The difference is small on paper, but has profound implications when thinking about three different parts of the user experience: teenage image-based communities, the witnessing of violence and systemic oppression, and communities centered around eating disorders or shared mental illness. For this project, I am exploring the ways these three parts functioned on both platforms, and how the nature of each platform impacts how the user interacts with the content they are using to represent themselves.

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old photo of me and mim at the forster fate 

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Part 1: Communities Based on Image

When reflecting on the heyday of Tumblr, it is easy to call to mind certain subcultures and fashion trends characteristic of the platform, a dynamic that is being replicated by teens on TikTok. In the earliest days of Tumblr really being accepted into the mainstream collection of social media networks, there were two main competing groups: the “Tumblr Girls” (sometimes called hipster blogs, although that was a unique appropriation of the term that was different from other “hipsters”) and the “emos”. The Tumblr Girls were the wholesome, cheerful types, and could be identified by their affinity for Starbucks, their obsession with their own youth, and their blogs dotted with photos, taken with a very high-quality camera, of them holding items up towards the lens, rendering their face and hair out of focus. The Emos, on the other hand, were consistent in characteristics both inside the platform and outside: dark clothes, dark makeup, dark hair, and dark humor. The two groups, generalizing a lot of more specific subgroups, formed a culture-counterculture dichotomy for users of the platform from 2012 to 2013. Through 2014, the two groups almost merged to form one dominant group that most people might think of when imagining Tumblr, which was the soft-grunge blog. Borrowing some music and fashion cues from the emos but without as much of the anger and angst, soft-grunge Tumblr led to the explosion of American Apparel, the Arctic Monkeys, and water sold in boxes. All of this is important because just six years later, the same phenomenon of two competing groups combining into one has repeated itself on TikTok. 2018 and 2019 on TikTok saw competition between two opposing groups: VSCO girls and E-Girls. VSCO girls were wholesome, carried Hydro Flask water bottles because they cared about the environment, and wore oversized T-shirts because they cared more about being comfortable than looking good. E-Girls were characterized by their bright dyed hair, equally bright makeup, and edgy outfits signaling that they spent a lot of their time on the Internet. A year later, the dominant fashion coming from the app is referred to as alt-TikTok and “dressing alt”, which borrows from VSCO girls their oversized shirts and affinity for thrifting, and combines it with the hair and makeup of E-Girls. Both platforms have their own rules for how one should present themselves in order to be a part of a certain community, which carries with it certain shared values. Tumblr allowed easier access to that community by allowing users to curate images taken by other people. Anyone could run a successful Tumblr blog without ever showing their face on the platform, which was important when the clothes or items associated with a community were especially pricey. Rather than buying it yourself, you could just share someone else’s image of the item, and still find other users who want to interact with you and your blog. TikTok does not provide the same privilege. TikTok requires someone to physically look a certain way because all content is created and posted by the user themselves. In order to gain attention on the platform, one must have the ability to buy the right clothes and go the right places, both of which are contingent on socioeconomic status. The aforementioned Hydro Flask water bottle preferred by VSCO girls costs $50, a price prohibitive for many teens. Additionally, a popular set of content includes “Day in My Life” vlogs, which tend to take place in cities like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, which alone prohibits participation for the many people who don’t live in those cities. Although TikTok trends resemble those on Tumblr, the format of the platform provides a steeper barrier to entry than existed before. TikTok users do not have the anonymity that Tumblr provided and thus are required to physically embody the content they put forward in order to have some participation in the community. One aspect of Tumblr was aspirational. As a teenager growing up in suburban Pennsylvania, I reblogged pictures of New York City daily, as a reminder of my eternal dream of escaping my hometown for the big city. I connected with plenty of other blogs who reposted similar content; we were united by our enjoyment of these images, not because we had any claim to their creation. This is a lot more difficult on TikTok. There is a very clear hierarchy on the platform: Those who post compilations of their lives in a major metropolitan area, and everyone else who tags their friends in the comments saying “Omg, Us someday!” This also functions on a body image level. Both platforms are bound in the same preferential treatment towards certain bodies. Those who deviate from that norm are placed at a disadvantage on both platforms, but on TikTok, they are excluded from communities entirely. The TikTok algorithm was demonstrated to have racial biases (Strapagiel), which has profound implications for creators who are people of color. The need to embody the image you wish to curate on TikTok puts additional pressure on young creators to control things they can’t control, from their body shape to the city they were born in. It is too early to say definitively how this will impact the generation being raised on this platform, especially given the isolation provided by the COVID-19 Pandemic, but it is a worrisome trend worthy of acknowledgment, with the hopes of mitigating some of the negative mental health impacts that may result.

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Young men trying to form a protective shield for their fellow female demonstrator as they run away from Israeli sniper fire. Saturday in Khan Younus, south Gaza.

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Part 2: Witnessing Conflict

Young people are increasingly getting their news through the lens of social media, which makes it that much more essential to understand the way different platforms refract information. For as long as people have used social media, the content posted has reflected current events more generally, something that is becoming especially acute as time passes. Tumblr users bore witness to several conflicts that unfolded across the world in the year 2014, something Rosemary Pennington chronicled in her article in the International Communication Gazette, “Witnessing the 2014 Gaza War in Tumblr”, through which she explores how several Muslim Tumblr users interacted with and witnessed the violence occurring towards Palestinians during the 2014 Gaza War. She writes in her introduction, “Traditionally, it has been witnessing that can make us feel close to those suffering through the violence we see in media as well as others we imagine are in the audience witnessing the event with us,” (Pennington). Tumblr as a platform provides both a means to witness the violence, as well as a community of fellow witnesses, inspiring feelings of closeness that would heighten emotions. In the case of the Gaza War, the bloggers take note of the fact that the mainstream media centers the experiences of Israelis and largely neglects Palestinian suffering in the construction of their narrative (Pennington). Through the usage of Tumblr, Palestinians can share photos and narratives that reflect their experiences, which can then be disseminated by bloggers elsewhere in the world, such as those who were the subject of Pennington’s research. The platform provides the space to construct an Oppositional Gaze, in the words of bell hooks. hooks writes of the oppositional gaze, “By courageously looking, we defiantly declared: ‘Not only will I stare, I want my look to change reality.’ Even in the worse circumstances of domination, the ability to manipulate one’s gaze in the face of structures of domination that would contain it, opens up the possibility of agency,” (hooks 116). Palestinians are able to control their gaze in a way that stares back at those who are oppressing them, counteracting the narrative that they are the sole aggressors and thus giving them agency. Tumblr elevated the narratives of Palestinians to the point where they could be held in conversation with and in contradiction to those pushed by wealthy media conglomerates. Communities centered around sending aid can also be formed on the platform which is only possible through the shared experience of witnessing. Pennington posits with her research that Tumblr was a crucial piece in raising global awareness of the situation in Gaza, a lasting impact of the platform.

Six years later, the world is no less familiar with incredible amounts of violence and suffering, especially as we live through the COVID-19 pandemic. Relegated to our houses, many Americans turned to TikTok for entertainment but found within it a well of resources for activists as the nation erupted in protests this summer in response to the killing of George Floyd and other Black Americans. TikTok, like Tumblr, allowed the average citizen to both bear witness to violence and share their narrative of the situation without it being refracted through the lens of a mainstream media source. TikTok, however, is still plagued by the same issues endemic to the platform; All content distribution is of course driven by the algorithm, which incentivizes outrageous or highly emotional content, raising the stakes to a point that may desensitize viewers after a certain amount of information. The algorithm can also end up prioritizing only a few voices, typically those who already have a platform. This in turn creates its own hierarchy which, although independent from traditional news networks, is still exclusionary. A lot of the information viewed is not controlled, as the primary interface on the app is the For You Page; if the average user is not putting in effort to control the type of information and content they are viewing, it’s not likely that they will put in effort to ensure that it is accurate or unbiased. 

TikTok and Tumblr users alike are fond of their image-based communities and continue to source them on the same platform that they source their news, the unintended consequence of which being the fascist aestheticization of politics as theorized by Benjamin in his 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. He writes, “All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war,” and later continues, “Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic,” (Benjamin 19-20) In the context of 2020 civil unrest, on TikTok, the juxtaposition of violent oppression with daily vlogs from teens in thrifted clothes dancing around big cities has led to both being subsumed into a dominant identity that holds “activism” as a core component. To truly be a member of the alt-TikTok community, one should be a self-identified leftist and activist. Both are noble ideas, and pushing for more accessible leftist literature is not a bad thing, but the issue arises when those looking for membership in the community are not willing or unable to do the work. The process of unlearning carceral understandings of justice and the subtle ways in which racism is intertwined in our everyday lives is a conscious, long, and oftentimes difficult process, that teens are undertaking with the ultimate goal being membership in a community of which the spokespeople are predominantly white and wealthy. The shortcut has become adding “BLM” and “ACAB” to a user’s bio, signaling to other users that they are socially aware. Memes that consisted of a cartoon character, such as Hello Kitty, saying “ACAB” were added to profiles, repositioning the acronym with long traditions in anti-racist and leftist activism as an aestheticized trend. The acronym is not entirely devoid of meaning, because leftist circles extend far beyond the teenage communities on TikTok, but to this new generation, adding ACAB to a bio means less a radical resistance to the carceral state and more a display of performative activism. This practice has led to the acronym being reappropriated into the pejorative term “Emily ACAB”, which typically refers to a wealthy, white teenage girl attempting to be performatively woke without renouncing any of her privileges. Emily ACAB is the rebellious teen daughter of the Karen who uses a movement meant to protect the lives of systematically marginalized groups as a way to separate herself from her family that “just does not understand” but ultimately won’t take too strong of a stance if it means sacrificing something of importance to her. The aestheticization of politics neutralizes the message, something that Benjamin knew all too well, and that TikTok teenagers, many of whom are well-meaning, now find themselves falling victim to. 

Despite being only separated by six years, teens in 2020 find themselves living and comprehending current events in a dramatically different world. No generation comes of age without a tremendous amount of hardship, personal and interpersonal, but Gen-Z is the first to have that hardship published on the internet. Social media has revolutionized organizing in many ways for the better, but as with all developments, it is one that requires active participation and checking of power. TikTok and Tumblr have made positive contributions to activism, but the nature of social media’s democratization of information requires we all pay attention to ensure neither platform does more harm than good.

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Hi Guardian I fixed your shitty headline for you. Also, can you please stop referring to soldiers shooting at unarmed civilians as “clashes”. You’re perpetuating the idea that this is a two-sided conflict as opposed to a powerful militarized state occupying and oppressing civilians.