
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Social media rules our generation. Gen Z has never lived in a world without the Internet, and it’s defined the scope of our lives thus far. While certain social media apps have entered our lives permanently, like Instagram or Youtube, others, like Vine, haven’t stood the test of time.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">In the past few years, an app called Tik Tok
burst onto the scene, and it’s shaping up to be a strong contender in the
battle for social media supremacy. Its development began when the app
Musical.ly was bought out by Chinese technology company ByteDance in 2017. They
evolved Musical.ly into the first version of what would be known as Tik Tok in
2018, and upon hitting the app store, Tik Tok became an instant sensation.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Tik Tok defines itself as a “video-sharing
social network used to create short lip-sync, comedy, and talent videos.” A
huge variety of videos are shared on the app, from dances to sketches to
various tutorials. The common thread uniting these videos is that an
overwhelming number of them are created by ordinary social media users, rather
than by social media stars that create content for a living.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Since 2018, Tik Tok has shot to exponential
levels of popularity, with over half a billion users worldwide and hundreds of
thousands of new videos posted each day. One must wonder how it was able to
achieve such levels of growth in two years time. Since we’ve witnessed that
apps like Vine and Musical.ly are doomed to fail, and Tik Tok is more or less a
conglomerate of the two, how has Tik Tok managed to succeed?</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">There are a few reasons why Tik Tok was able to grow in popularity in the way it did. Based on pure content, Tik Tok takes the best parts of both of those aforementioned applications — the six-second comedy sketches of Vine and the dancing and lip-synching videos of Musical.ly — and combines them in one simple, user-friendly app. When the wildly popular short-video app Vine was discontinued in 2017, the void for a short-video app on the market remained until Tik Tok began to rise. Tik Tok serves the same general purpose of Vine, both filling that gap and carving out its own niche in the process. As a result, it caught on like wildfire, drawing a larger and larger audience until its scope reached across the world.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Perhaps the biggest draw to Tik Tok is that
it’s genuinely possible for anybody to ‘become a creator,’ or even to ‘go
viral&#8217;. It&#8217;s one thing to memorize a dance routine that’s several minutes long,
devoting hours of practice towards a complicated finished product. But the
15-second chunks of dance that made Tik Tok so famous are easily-digestible,
upper-body focused combinations that require virtually zero previous dance
skills to execute properly. </p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">One has the option to create a video using
either their own original sound or a preexisting audio clip/song. The editing
interface makes adding filters, text, or distortion to videos a straightforward
process that requires no real editing knowledge or talent to master.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Besides the millions of dance videos, Tik Tok
features a plethora of comedy videos that range from elaborate skits to a
four-second hastily-told joke. Some of these comedy videos are genuinely funny,
some are dumb, and some are poorly executed and pointless.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">These poorly-executed videos are the backbone
of Tik Tok, however; they demonstrate that you don’t need to be good at
writing, acting, editing, or dancing to successfully make a Tik Tok. At the
heart of Tik Tok’s growth is its accessibility, its exponentially expanding
audience of individuals that can create and share whatever content they desire.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">So will Tik Tok become a social media ‘essential,’ like Instagram or Twitter? Or will it only remain popular until the next social media fad comes along and dethrones it, sending it spiraling into oblivion? Only time will tell. Soon, however, I have no doubt that more and more individuals will at least continue to succumb to temptation and download Tik Tok to see what the hype is about. </p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Cover Photo: World Vector Logo</p>
 <!-- WP Biographia v4.0.0 -->
<div class="wp-biographia-container-top" style="background-color: #FFEAA8; border-top: 4px solid #000000;"><div class="wp-biographia-pic" style="height:100px; width:100px;"><img alt='' src='https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/3eb32476590daa95860eb0a1595a8faeb75da80817c81b1dbe414707a77ebaf3?s=100&#038;d=wp_user_avatar&#038;r=g' srcset='https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/3eb32476590daa95860eb0a1595a8faeb75da80817c81b1dbe414707a77ebaf3?s=200&#038;d=wp_user_avatar&#038;r=g 2x' class='wp-biographia-avatar avatar-100 photo' height='100' width='100' /></div><div class="wp-biographia-text"><h3>About <a href="https://tulanemagazine.com/author/cliquori/" title=" "> </a></h3><p></p><div class="wp-biographia-links"><small><ul class="wp-biographia-list wp-biographia-list-text"><li><a href="mailto:c&#108;iq&#117;o&#114;i&#64;t&#117;la&#110;&#101;.edu" target="_self" title="Send Mail" class="wp-biographia-link-text">Mail</a></li> | <li><a href="https://tulanemagazine.com/author/cliquori/" target="_self" title="More Posts By " class="wp-biographia-link-text">More Posts(6)</a></li></ul></small></div></div></div><!-- WP Biographia v4.0.0 -->

Tik Tok: Taking Over Social Media
