2023, Vol.12, No.1, pp. 48-60.

48

©2023 Hewlett-Hall. This is an open access article distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY)

which permits the user to copy, distribute, and transmit the work provided that the original authors and source are credited.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Social media platforms such as TikTok are often regarded as constituting a fundamental shift in everyday modes

of sociality; their immense scope, mysterious algorithms and darker subsections seem to pose a threat to

‘traditional’ forms of social communication. In downloading TikTok during an undergraduate degree in

anthropology, however, and furthermore in conducting that degree during the COVID-19 pandemic, I have in

fact found some of the most essential components of ‘traditional’ sociality, and thus the traditional subjects of

anthropological inquiry (specifically folklore and storytelling), to have emerged in my interactions on the app. As

I have studied anthropology during a global pandemic, so too have I learnt the varied social rules and collective

norms of TikTok, which provided many with a sense of sociality which was lost during lockdowns, and in my

involvement with the TikTok Ethnography Collective at Goldsmiths I have found new possibilities of

conducting ethnographic fieldwork at a time when it seemed impossible. In this article, I draw on my experience

In print and television journalism, pop-cultural discourse and conversations with friends, social media platforms

are often viewed in a somewhat pejorative light. They seem to be regarded as constituting the modern apex of

social communication, a relational extreme of ‘modernity’, which have been incorporated into our day-to-day

lives at the expense of ‘traditional’ modes of interaction, such as the written word, oral storytelling, or localised

folklore. The enormity and reach of the internet and social media platforms is often lamented; as we can now

access anything, and contact anyone, has something been lost in our social ways of being?

In studies of the digital and social media, however, anthropologists have found that such online spaces might

instead hold the potential to harbour rich and varied forms of social interaction and communication. Building on

Moore, 2012, p. 41), it can be revealed in such sites as a social media platform. In this article, I aim to explore

such digital sociality on TikTok specifically, in tandem with a reflection on digital studies in anthropology and the

social sciences, especially during periods of time in which in-person ethnographic fieldwork was made

impossible.

Having started my anthropology undergraduate programme in September 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic put a

stop to in-person teaching just six months into my first year, and I felt keenly the impact of the transition to

online lectures and seminars. The seedlings of new friendships were put under immense strain, familiarity with

lecturers became practically impossible, and any hopes of conducting practical ethnographic fieldwork during my

time at university were shattered. Although online teaching fulfilled its base function of transferring knowledge

necessary at the time, was largely ineffective.

During this time, however, the social media platform TikTok emerged as a potential substitute to the social

serendipity of spaces like the pub or university corridors. Under national lockdown and during periods of self-

isolation, TikTok provided me and my housemates with a tangible link to the wider world where other digital

platforms were found to be lacking. As digital anthropology has followed sociality online, so too did it follow

TikTok. During my second year, I joined the TikTok Ethnography Collective established at Goldsmiths – a

network of students and lecturers that, like me, that had discovered TikTok through lockdown and now wished

to interrogate it ethnographically. Through this collective, I soon found myself able to engage practically with

anthropological questions from my bedroom, connecting ethnographic theory from readings and seminar classes

research.

In this article, I draw on my experience of using TikTok - whilst conducting my degree - as ethnographic

material, in order to shine further light on the richness of sociality which is present on the app. As highlighted in

a recent ‘Social Infrastructures’ report compiled by Laura Bear and other anthropologists, the sociality provided

by social media proved crucial to many across the country that sought solace online during lockdown (Bear, et

al., 2021, p. 40). 20% of the people they interviewed cited social media and online communities as a significant

source of support during the pandemic – placing it ahead of faith institutions, neighbours, mental health

professionals, and local support groups, and only behind friends, support bubbles and family (ibid). The speed at

which the TikTok userbase in the United Kingdom grew between 2020 and 2021

was no doubt largely due to

communication infrastructure during lockdown, that this article is concerned with. Through extending classical

areas of anthropological exploration – storytelling and folktales – to the digital realm, I will outline the ways in

which sociality is in fact achieved on and through TikTok.

There are of course ethical and political dimensions to studying alternative modes of sociality (Long & Moore,

2012, p. 43); the motivations of a particular app or algorithm, and the negative effects of social media on mental

health, cannot be disregarded. This is raised in everyday conversations, too; TikTok specifically is actively

avoided by many friends who say they already spend ‘too much time on their phone’, whilst regular users

bemoan their overuse of the app and the overexposure it provides to such a broad variety of content. Such

arguments are also deployed in broader political discourses surrounding TikTok, which is regularly regarded with

myself, immersed in the app and the social life emerging from it, and as an anthropologist, I often find myself

jumping to its defence, or else wishing to complicate the discussion surrounding it. Many of those criticisms are

legitimate, but I also find them to provide only a partial and incomplete picture, and this article is concerned with

redressing that balance; principally in discourses of popular culture, the media, and everyday conversations.

In the comedian Bo Burnham’s 2021 Netflix show Inside, he paints a picture of the internet as a sinister and

boundless space, full of ecstatic delight and ominous danger in equal (and apparently infinite) measures. His song

Welcome to the Internet addresses this at length, describing an environment where you can instantly jump from the

news, to pornography, to cooking tips and back again, and get just as easily caught up in light-hearted online

quizzes as you can in misogynistic chat rooms (Inside, 2021). It is depicted as a near-sentient entity, which forces

online content onto the user faster than the user can seek it out themselves. The song’s YouTube video has over

115 million views

could well be equally directed towards TikTok. The app is deeply multiplicitous, with users watching several

videos on an enormous range of topics in just a matter of minutes. When Inside was released, my For You Page

(FYP)

was filled with discussion of its themes and topics, with users relating it to TikTok specifically. Aside

from the responses to Inside, I have also seen several users complain that unrestricted access to the internet in

their youth may have caused them long lasting harm, and the experience of being exposed to such a wide variety

of content on TikTok is often discussed pejoratively. It seems, then, that Burnham’s feelings on the internet are

common; there appears to be a shared understanding that despite its benefits, there is something about the

immense scope of the internet that gives rise to something darker.

~

In a YouTube conversation to celebrate a new edition of The Storyteller by Verso Books, Esther Leslie (the

translator of the edition, and Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck) brings Benjamin’s ideas into direct

conversation with contemporary social media (Leslie & Jeffries, 2023). Leslie focuses on Benjamin’s observations

on the newspaper, where several pieces of information exist side by side without relation to one another (ibid),

and likens these observations to her understanding of social media, especially TikTok. She describes such

platforms as an “endless flow”, of “fifteen second” videos, “each one different, and by the time you’ve seen the

next one you’ve forgotten what the last one was” (ibid). The result is an “amplified” version of Benjamin’s

depiction of the newspaper (ibid), where the fragmented arrangement of information is taken to an extreme, and

so presumably the communicability of experience is similarly diminished. In the discussion, both Leslie and

half-forgotten, unspecified past, where stories are shared over the hearth and passed on between and within

communities. As is also the case with the pub with no phones, there is a danger here of pining for a past which

you don’t yourself remember (Boym, 2001); for Benjamin it is pre-novel, for myself the pre-internet. That said,

his writing is convincing and thorough, and he makes a good case for the demise of an important part of

sociality.

For my purposes here, the core value of Benjamin’s writing lies in the resonance it holds when placed in relation

to such contemporary, pop-cultural discourses as a comedy-musical Netflix show. Nearly a century after it was

written, The Storyteller holds key insights into the consequences of ever-expanding information technologies.

“Boredom”, says Benjamin, “is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience” (Benjamin, 1936, p. 5) –

In her article Walter Benjamin on the Video Screen: Storytelling and Game Narratives, Carly Kocurek describes a similar

potential for Benjamin’s writings (Kocurek, 2018). Although not focused on the internet or online platforms,

Kocurek reorientates the key ideas of The Storyteller towards video games, and in doing so highlights the

possibilities they hold for positive and meaningful experiences, equally imbued with counsel and wisdom as the

storytelling which Benjamin laments. The games which Kocurek discusses “aspire to convey or form shared

experiences and produce deep emotional responses” (ibid, p. 2). This is achieved through the game designers’

choices in producing games which incorporate some form of moral value, which model political or cultural

dilemmas, or which centre on complex narrative worlds (ibid, p. 7-8). Although the efficacy and value of

storytelling might not be reducible to a standardised formula, Kocurek details several games which do achieve

Moore (Long & Moore, 2012). In their article Sociality Revisited: Setting a New Agenda, they look to new approaches

in anthropology to understand sociality “in light of developments and challenges that have been posed…over the

past twenty years” (ibid, p. 41). Technological developments, as well as theoretical turns within the discipline,

have left previous definitions of sociality on uncertain ground, and Long and Moore work to conceptualise a

working theory of sociality as “a dynamic relational matrix”, in which humans and non-humans are involved in

an ongoing process of interaction and influence (ibid, p. 41). Long and Moore call on ANT (Actor-Network

Theory) to suggest that “phenomena should be considered ‘social’ if they are ‘intrinsically interactive’” (ibid, p.

44); as such, sociality could come to be described as “a radical relationality, association, or assembly” (ibid).

When considering ethnographic sites online, this broadens their potential for sociality.

uploading of images to Instagram, for example, is regarded by the young people Miller talks to as a distinct

“craft”, which requires an understanding of collective social rules of what “looks good” (ibid, p. 6-7). Such an

observation invokes discourses around taste, cultural norms, status and image-making technologies; as a result,

sociality on the app is made demonstrably clear. Indeed, the concepts of 20

Century social theorists, such as

Marilyn Strathern and Pierre Bourdieu, are found to be entirely apt in Miller’s discussion (ibid, p. 5, 7). In his

article, Miller details the ways in which social media users engage with one another and the technology they are

using to constitute a valid, even valuable site of sociality.

In growing more accustomed to the norms and principles of TikTok over time, and becoming more in tune with

the ways in which experiences are shared through (and shaped by) videos, I began to find profound similarities

into learning routines, I became more familiar with the app and its nuances.

It was not until I moved back to London for the beginning of my second year, however, and moved into a house

with the same TikTok-using art students from my first-year accommodation, that my perception of the app

entirely shifted from the impression I still had of it from when it was Musical.ly. I was shown increasingly

subversive and alternative content from my housemates, where political discourse, pop-cultural analysis and

humour were all interwoven with one another, and it seemed the platform had come a long way from where it

had been before the pandemic. It felt as if a whole avenue of popular culture had just emerged overnight, and I

felt drawn to explore it. Slightly hesitantly, I downloaded TikTok in January 2021.

Perhaps influenced by an increasingly reflexive and self-aware academic anthropology, or perhaps just motivated

by a social fear of being ‘weird’, I felt that I needed to identify myself

5

. This first involved the uploading of a

profile picture and the creation of a username, and subsequently the uploading of content. In doing so, I felt like

I became a ‘proper’ TikTok user, and had crossed over into the murky grey area in which most people on

TikTok seem to operate; both a producer and consumer of content, never entirely one or the other.

videos I made followed this theme; they were made without much knowledge of the principles, subtleties or

presuppositions which run through the particular ‘side’ of TikTok which I now inhabit. I was experimenting with

the tools and technology of the app itself, unaware of the nuanced ways in which features such as duetting,

stitching or using audio

6

can be utilised to make both powerful political statements or banal (but nevertheless

funny or poignant) personal observations. I was trying to force my own creative principles and tastes onto an

environment which already had a language system and codes of communication in place. What followed, then,

was a learning process, of the techniques and reference points which together make up a sort of collective

even possible to be rewarded for uploading videos with mistakes, as are many elderly TikTok users, who upload

clumsily edited videos which sporadically go ‘viral’. Whilst chatrooms like 4chan, or platforms like Twitter, might

evoke a feeling of browsing through content, with which users are free to engage as they wish, TikTok inspires a

sense of immersion in the content which surrounds you. It is therefore very difficult to lurk on TikTok; even if

you remain anonymous to other users, you will still be ‘seen’ by the app and its algorithm, which tailors content

based on your previous activity. TikTok thus inspires a mode of sociality which is well suited to an

anthropological investigation; participant observation on the app is a necessity.

~

After a few weeks of watching and making videos by myself, I made a TikTok with the help of my housemates

(who were at that point much more well-versed in the lore and principles of the app), and this was the first of my

line of the song is preceded by a strum of an electric guitar, at which point a new character/component is

introduced who represents a disruption or threat to the status quo. This new character/component is almost

always represented by someone with two fingers of one hand pointing to the opposite forearm

disparate) cultural touchstones, a trend such as this one emerges onto an FYP, often from a single original video,

where it is then reproduced and built upon by other users. It’s largely irrelevant if a TikTok user hasn’t seen that

original video or isn’t entirely familiar with all of the trend’s components – if a user doesn’t understand a trend

then it won’t take long for them to work it out, have a friend explain it to them off-app, or else it might be

explained in another video. The fact that the ‘Hayloft’ trend is so difficult to explain coherently in written form is

testament to the idea that TikTok has to be learnt (its deeply contextual nature is also made clear when trying to

explain it to a ‘non-TikToker’); far from being an endless vista of disparate, multiplicitous and disconnected

content, the app is rich with shared principles of social expression. My version didn’t entirely fit with the usual

semiotics of the trend (the only thing that I/my greenhouse was disrupting was a haphazard method of home

gardening), but at the time I thought the idea was funny enough to enlist my housemates to help film it, and I

In Walter Benjamin’s discussion of storytelling, he describes the way in which “traces of the storyteller cling to

the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel” (Benjamin, 1936, p. 5). But despite his

accusation of information technologies bringing about the demise of such a process, this could just as well be a

video games which aim to provide counsel or wisdom (Kocurek, 2018, p. 7); on TikTok, speaking directly to the

camera is the chosen medium of a large proportion of videos. Furthermore, users will often post comments

requesting a “story time” if they feel that not enough information has been shared in a video. If a user has

uploaded a TikTok which loosely references a dramatic event in their personal lives (such as a particularly

scandalous break-up, or a shocking interaction with a colleague at work), those who are engaged by the content

will ask for this to be expanded on with an additional “story time” video, which will be then uploaded with a link

back to the original video. Despite it being mediated through a third-party software, such a direct interaction

between the storyteller and the audience is overwhelmingly indicative of the modes of communication which

Benjamin laments.

In Whitney Phillips and Ryan M. Milner’s book The Ambivalent Internet (2017), they discuss the phenomena of

online folklore, exploring how a traditional and presumably embodied feature of sociality can in fact thrive in a

space as ‘modern’ and ‘new’ as the internet. They dismantle the common dichotomy of pre- and post-internet,

which is reinforced in everyday conversations and popular media (and indeed in Bo Burnham’s song), to reveal

refine exactly what constitutes ‘folklore’. Essentially, it involves “a stable (if small) group with many factors in

common” and whose communicative exchanges are “steeped in consistent, locally derived traditions” (ibid, p.

24). Alongside these traditions, it is the constant evolution of folklore which brings it to life; traditions are played

with and responded to, and the old and familiar becomes the backdrop for new jokes and stories to be

exchanged. It is this “twin law”, then, of conservative precedent and dynamic transformation, that really defines

folklore, rather than the common assumption that folklore equates to little more than ‘old stuff’ (ibid, p. 23).

With this definition, Phillips and Milner are well placed to effectively analyse the ways in which folklore might

arise in less obvious environments, such as the internet, and they detail several cases which bridge (if not entirely

transcend) the pre- and post-internet and the folk/modern divides

9

.

lore in crypto discourse. It is a tradition based on a mistake; a drunken rant from a ‘netizen’ whose share in

bitcoin was rapidly decreasing in value. Against the conventional wisdom to sell, he had decided to hold onto his

stocks and risk absolute loss; in the title of his blogpost, however, he had misspelt “HOLD” as “HODL”. As a

result, his typo became a rallying cry to ‘hodl’ no matter what, and “was later acronymized to ‘hold on for dear

life’” (ibid, p. 2). Yogarajah argues that ‘hodl’ became part of the folklore of online cryptocurrency communities,

and was used by people to share their own personal experiences remixed with this ‘archetypal’ story. A process

of constant iteration, building on previous stories, comes to keep the online community alive.

It’s not difficult to relate these ideas back to the experience of using TikTok. Each video references and builds