My week in the weird world of TikTok
Judi Dench and octogenarian fitness fiends show the video platform isn’t just for the young. Hattie Garlick joins the 15-second craze
Ihave been on the social media platform TikTok for just 10 minutes before I text my 21-year-old niece. “Help me,” I type. “I’m so confused. I feel like I’ve taken a Zimmer frame into a nightclub.”
TikTok, which allows users to share home-made 15-second video clips set to music, was the most downloaded app of 2020, and is now estimated to have more than a billion users globally. In essence, it’s Instagram in motion, backed by a looped beat. Last year, more than half of these moving selfies employed hip-hop or rap tunes by artists such as Megan Thee Stallion and DaBaby.
Not familiar with their oeuvres? Perhaps because, at the last count, 18- to 26-year-olds made up the largest age group on the app.
This may, however, be changing. Because as TikTok takes over the world, it is also growing up. Major brands such as Nike and Google have begun posting their own videos. In the States, a quarter of its users are now aged 45-64. Here in the UK, Judi Dench is an evangelical convert, declaring that making distanced videos with her grandson “saved her life” in lockdown.
Meanwhile, the app’s content appears to be diversifying away from twerking tweens into distinctly more middle-aged territories. If someone called @cookingmummi can now attract 104,000 TikTok followers and oven-cleaning videos are suddenly going viral, might it finally be time for a curmudgeonly technophobe like me to download the app? To find out, I decided to spend a week immersed in the weird world of TikTok.
DANCE CHALLENGES
Much like Instagram, TikTok allows you to search for content either by hashtagged subject matter or by creator. After downloading the app, my first stop is at Sam Williams’s page (@sam.williams1). At 23 years old, Williams is not exactly of my own tribe. Since the start of the pandemic, however, he has been adding a new genre to his popular comedy skits – dance challenges undertaken with his octogenarian grandmother, Dame Judi.
If you want to get to grips with TikTok, you must start with dance challenges. These viral routines to popular songs were instrumental in the app’s rise to global domination. Basically, you learn a series of choreographed movements, film your attempt, then post the video to your own account.
The concept leaves me cold, but if it’s all right with Judi, then I suppose it’s OK with me. So my seven-year-old daughter and I prop up my phone on the kitchen island and attempt to follow
Dench, Williams and his mother Finty as they dance around their garden to a looped sample of Savage Love (Laxed – Siren Beat).
An astonishing 50million people have now posted their own versions of this same routine on TikTok. Why? The tune is infuriating catchy. The moves are so simple they’re almost infantile. Yet as we soon discover, it’s a strangely addictive activity, especially as another endless Saturday afternoon stretches out at home. We scroll through Dench and Williams’s dance videos, learning each one. I begin to worry that lockdown has scrambled our brains even more than I’d realised.
EXERCISE
Judi Dench is not, however, TikTok’s only silver sensation. Enter Erika Rischko (@erikarischko), an 81-year-old from Germany who has racked up more than 130,000 followers and 2.4million likes after her daughter convinced her to join the platform at the start of the pandemic, as a way of keeping in touch with friends and family.
Rischko posts regular videos in which she herself undertakes new workout routines. They are filmed in her sitting room and, sometimes, to a soundtrack of sea shanties. This sounds exactly the right standard for me, so I head to her page, attempt to follow along and receive two immediate and unpleasant surprises.
Rischko is no ordinary octogenarian and this is not chair yoga. I am flattened after just a few rounds of her “cupid shuffle challenge”, in which she effortlessly holds herself in the plank position while executing a series of fancy foot moves.
Nor are these ordinary sea shanties. This is “ShantyTok”, a bewildering new trend in which traditional sea shanties are remixed with dance beats and employed to wildly popular effect on the app. Thirty minutes in, I find myself in awe, overwhelmed, but mostly in agony.
CLEANING
Next, I decide to focus on something guaranteed to bring my heart rate down – cleaning. Over the past year, TikTok has developed a popular niche in housekeeping hacks. More than 15.4million people, for instance, have watched a video in which a wooden spoon is placed in a glass of steaming water, into which it slowly secretes grime.
I follow the creator of this viral video, @miss.clean.with.me, and enter a strange world of intense close-ups. First, I am transported inside her kitchen sink, watching her employ a particular brand of cloth to shine it. Next, I find myself face down on her carpet as she Shake ’n’ Vacs it clean. This is all very instructive yet like many of TikTok’s cleaning gurus, @miss. clean.with.me is only 20 years old. Part of me wishes she spent her time making a mess, instead of cleaning it up, but this is probably indicates a problem with my generation, not hers.
COOKING
Perhaps, I think, I’ll find my comfort zone in TikTok’s cooking content? Search #recipe and you find thousands of kitchen hacks and recipes, mostly filmed in home kitchens and pleasingly stripped of the filtered perfection that Instagrammers espouse.
First, I watch a tutorial on creating Korean dumplings from scratch. It moves so fast I suffer motion sickness. Then, I tackle TikTok’s biggest viral hit which involves placing a whole block on feta on some cherry tomatoes and whacking it in the oven. It’s every bit as delicious as you’d imagine an entire block of liquid cheese to be. But I can’t shake the feeling that the app’s time limits (a maximum of four linked, 15 second video segments) mean recipes must either be flusteringly fast or so simple they don’t really require tutorials.
AND… RELAX
I decide to end the week with a bit of “me time”. Luckily, there are videos for that, too. Only, as ever, there’s a twist. TikTokers don’t go in for conventional meditations. Instead, you’ll find reams of content devoted to autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR), or that strangely relaxing tingling sensation sometimes provoked by sounds like whispers, accents and crackles.
ASMR was already huge before the pandemic. In lockdown, however, it has exploded. I open the app for the last time and seek out @deepsleepapp, a channel with more than 8.1million likes. I dim the lights and enter a world in which ice cream making is filmed, with the sounds of scraping, crackling, crunching turned up high, or shaving foam is sprayed from a can and squeezed in a stranger’s hands.
It is all profoundly strange, inexplicably addictive and, in fact, the perfect embodiment of my week on TikTok.
The app’s time limits mean recipes feel either flusteringly fast or so simple they don’t really require tutorials