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What’s The Future of Tik Tok?

I’ve spent the last two weeks writing short scripts for a sitcom on Tik Tok about the life of an artist struggling to find his voice. Sound familiar?

Through my experiments with different accounts and comedy stylings on Tik Tok, I’ve found a sort of middle ground between jokes that are intellectual (Meat Boy) and hit the lowest common denominator (Sock Talks). Yet, I can’t help but hit a wall with the story.

A sitcom was my initial idea for this series because I’ve never seen a Tik Tok use a laugh track. Using sitcom conventions could challenge the Tik Tok norms, illuminating the inherent politics of the medium: a glitch in the system.

The platform, however, situates my videos within an endless stream of loosely related, hypnotically entertaining content. In a way, my videos are already situated within a grander show — a collaborative one with content creators with similar sensibilities to mine. Creating my own show with a serial narrative is perhaps forcing too much control over the viewer’s experience. It would be imposing media formalities of the past onto the present without innovation. How could I lean into the strengths For You Page format better?

The central questions become: how is my work an interruption of the endless stream of media my viewer is watching? Does making the viewer aware of the conventions of Tik Tok change their life in a meaningful way? Can I find a way to both entertain and question the viewer?

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