MK
@mkay
MK
@mkay
TikTok enables and invites the pointed, witty, playful, allusive, zany and endlessly inventive combination of video, music and text. But the creative energies of its more than one billion users are circumscribed and channeled by the architecture of the platform.
TikTok’s spectacular success in enlisting consumers as producers depends on making
... See moreSome invest a lot of time and skill in crafting TikTok videos, but neither time nor skill is required. If TikTok “enables everyone to be a creator,” as its former mission statement proclaimed, this is because creative labor on the platform has been automated and deskilled.
It’s become something of a sport to unearth these sorts of replies, the ones where strangers make willfully decontextualized moral judgments on other people’s lives. We give these people and these kinds of conversations names: “chronically online” or “terminally online,” implying that too much exposure to too many people’s weird ideas makes us all
... See moreWelcome to the flat era of fashion. Flat is what happens when consumers buy clothing on the basis of how it looks in two dimensions, in an image to be shared on social media.
On the old internet, you could show a different side of yourself in every forum or chat room; but on your Facebook feed, you had to be the same person to everyone you knew.
When we dress to be photographed, we increasingly dress to be distributed as an image, and thus transformed into a kind of ad.