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tiktok: it’s more than lip syncing

TikTok, a social video-sharing app that last year, had more downloads on the Apple app store than Instagram, exists as one of the most interesting microcosms that has formed within the digital sphere to date. It’s late-night comedian Jimmy Fallon’s favourite app. It’s powered by Chinese-owned AI. Its features fly in the face of of American platforms but are imperative to Chinese media; its videos require sound, it aggressively monitors user data, there is a strong emphasis on memes and viral challenges over individual influencers, and it closely mirrors the collectively-mourned Vine.

TikTok describes itself as a hub for short-form mobile videos, wherein users create videos of up to 15 seconds long, and looping videos that can reach a minute; usually accompanied by music to which users commonly lip sync to. It fills a gap in a niche market where Vine used to be, the American-grown short-video app shuttered by Twitter in 2017. China’s domestic version of TikTok, Douyin, is the subject of heavy surveillance and censorship; last year, Peppa Pig was even purged from the platform due to its growing popularity among the country’s shehuiren, or, the countries anti-establishment counterculture, leading the government to believe the character had taken on subversive meaning in either a direct order or as a preemptive measure.

TikTok was slapped with a $5.7 million dollar fine from the US government for the illegal collection of personal information of users under the age of 13, taken when the app was originally known as Musical.ly. The push for deletion of “vulgar” content, through the adding of thousands of human moderators in collaboration with China’s state censors, reflects upon just how hyper-visible the government is in something as seemingly harmless as a lip-syncing video app. It’s a microcosm, a series of worlds within itself; there are unspoken factions of users - the country-cowboy Tik-Tokkers, the “Eboys” and “Egirls” and just about everything in between. 

It’s highly personalised and infinitely scrollable with short, full-screen videos, lit with bright colours and bearing lots of visual stimulation, incentivizing users to jump on bandwagon culture and viral meme formats. The app requires no semblance of social networking to figure out exactly the content you’d like to see; instead, it relies on data collection, starting with location. It analyzes what you watch the longest. It factors in your likes and comments into its algorithm. It can get to know you without you even realising it.

It’s unclear where exactly the rise of Tiktok will take us. But what is clear, is that it’s definitely not just lip syncing.

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“voluntweeters” and crowdsourcing in crisis

Our world is in no shortage of crises, disasters or mass emergencies or chaos; but it is the response to chaos that shines a light upon humanity, wherein mass devastation can tap into a deeply rooted altruism in our nature - and in the aftermath of tragedy, the best versions of ourselves can rise to the surface. Crowdsourcing is just one example wherein the “digital volunteer” — the sum of crowdsourcing and collective social behaviour — contributes to the massive response, relief and recovery efforts related to a catastrophic event (Starbird). Most commonly associated with crowdsourcing, is Ushahidi’s crowdmap, which gained popularity in 2008 for its use in mapping the fallout of post-election violence in Kenya, with the ability to synthesize and geotag user-generated, user-friendly content; people-powered and described as having used two different techniques of crowdsourcing. The software proved able to map casualties in South Sudan, provide useful humanitarian information during Haiti’s devastating earthquake and to assess the number of casualties in the Syrian civil war; individuals on the ground in Haiti during a 7.0 magnitude earthquake could send SMS messages with reports of trapped persons beneath collapsed structures and those in need of shelter and food, assisting relief agencies that struggled to meet those basic needs (Plucinska). SMS messages were processed by a remote and virtual “crowd” of digital volunteers  who then verified  the  information, plotting it onto a publicly available crowdmap; this principle was then later deployed amongst dozens of events including the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, the Pakistan floods, and a handful of winter snowstorms in the Northeast United States. It becomes evident that through our struggles, comes a sense of camaraderie not otherwise displayed; its as if the very worst events are meant to happen, for us as humans to show the power behind our goodness. Tweeting for Haiti, as a way for helpers to volunteer their time, sometimes entire waking days from areas far removed from the event, began for most as simply creating a Twitter account. What became of it, was a remarkable ways of helping, through means of self-organising in a highly networked world.

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controversy for the sake of it: on trolling and being a digital citizen

Almost any literature on trolling will tell you of a troll’s often deviant and disruptive nature, their ability to generate outrage and controversy and spark attention through diverse and often pseudo‐sincere behaviors. I seek to pose a question of the behaviours behind trolling and purposefully disruptive speech; and of the schema of trolling we have come to understand. Is any controversial opinion, deviant from the norm, considered trolling? Or is being controversial, for the sake of being simply controversial, a more fitting definition?

“Trolling” is of the harmless but often irritating set of behaviours online that seek to provoke the ordinary, reasonable person; to intentionally set alight common online areas to assess reactions ranging from anger at provocation to appreciation of humour (Sanfilippo, Yang and Fichman, 2017). It remains the practice of using disinformation and misinformation to promote parochial agendas, and reveals an interesting partial taxonomy on the wholly different manifestations of trolling; because the problem isn’t necessarily in the reason behind trolling, but in the varied and often untraceable methods by which it can be administered.  

As a readily accessible and weaponized form of speech, trolling can be carefully crafted to elicit hostility, to groom and bait, to “fish” for similarly radical opinions and to spark dividedness for its own sake. It has the power to delegitimize, to defame, to create diversions from bigger issues and to spread what we’ve come to understand as “fake news” or “alt-right” information to the fence-sitters, the gullible and the confused. It is these traits that are reflected in the “Dark Tetrad” personality traits of narcissism, “Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism” (Craker and March, 2016). The Internet, being an extension of ourselves and our society, acts as the medium through which trolls find space to practice their antisocial behaviours upon often unsuspecting victims; and given the enormity of the Internet and social media networking sites, is there truly any realistic way to remove these behaviours?

As a cynic, I say not.

https://www-sciencedirect-com.ezproxy.lib.swin.edu.au/science/article/pii/S0191886916307930

https://onlinelibrary-wiley-com.ezproxy.lib.swin.edu.au/doi/full/10.1002/asi.23902

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3. blurred lines;  on culture jamming, vandalism and activism

“Unleash the fiend, invoke your dark side, vandalise everything. Stand in the middle of traffic and dance. Return favours twofold, and return malice fivefold.”

These were the words spoken during “Culture Jamming: How to Make Trouble and Influence People” in a 1998 ABC radio podcast.

“Break your chains”, they said. But how?

At what point, do we create a distinction between vandalism and activism? Is all vandalism considered activism, intentionally political or not? Is protesting the media by which accompanies our lives, through the media, a convoluted attempt at making a statement? Or is it’s sweet irony, the hacking, the mocking and the re-contextualisation exactly what we need?

The 1990’s saw the practice of culture jamming come to fruition, its premise simple; to disrupt consumer culture through the transformation of corporate advertising with subversive messages. Culture jamming intends to critique the manipulation of society through a dominant media landscape, probing the public to question corporate power, undermining the intention of advertisers in a wholly ironic manner.

The current top-dog of Buzzfeed Jonah Peretti in 2001, sought to follow this notion through his attempt to order a customised pair of Nike’s, through Nike, branded with the word “sweatshop”; a direct and unwavering protest against the hypocrisy of the company’s labour practices, clearly devoid of the very freedom Nike attempted to give its customers through customisation. Peretti himself said the types of messages he received in refusal of his seemingly counter-productive protest, questioned the logic behind condemning a brand for its practices whilst simultaneously supporting it through the purchase. If we truly seek to condemn a brand, would boycotting it all together be the less counterproductive approach? Or is it in the absurdity of culture jamming that we find ourselves reflecting upon an ever-expanding consumerist society? Will introspection into these brands force us to face the reality of advertising, and it's almost eerie omnipresence?

Culture jamming, at its roots, seeks to give a voice to voiceless and marginalised, to offset the growing presence of advertisement from multinational conglomerates through whats been called “billboard banditry”; an all-encompassing term that draws on the almost vigilante-like properties of it all. But what about it’s critics?

It is ultimately disheartening, coming to the understanding that modern marketing use the core motifs of parody and irony, the very ammunition of culture jamming itself. Where do we draw the line between culture and counterculture? Is resistance futile? The significance culture jamming gains from its novelty, its absurdity, may be counterproductive in the sense that we view it as simply a novelty, simply vandalism, something to find humour in for a brief moment, before we buy our next pair of Nike kicks.

http://depts.washington.edu/ccce/polcommcampaigns/peretti.html

https://ro.ecu.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1002&context=isw

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1041794X.2013.815267

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/05/the-new-culture-jamming-how-activists-will-respond-to-online-advertising/257176/

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Up there with one of my favourite Palmer quotes.

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Scott Morrison getting Snapchat…

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clive palmer might be a mining billionaire fatcat, but he’s a bloody genius. here’s why

“Have a mint slice, don’t think twice, vanilla slice, and Beetroot.” -Clive Palmer

Clive Palmer, “humble meme merchant” and billionaire Tim-Tam advocate, understands the controlled message as a means of bypassing the mainstream. So much so, that his recent descent into an “alt-right” cesspool of orchestrated political memes, could be construed as a legitimate political strategy delivered through a series of subliminally controlled messages through social media. Palmer’s capitalisation of the controversial “alt-right” meme for political gain can be deconstructed in two parts:

Tactical targeting

The “era of social media” has given rise to the various and often omnipresent communications between politicians and the public (Enli, 2016). A shift of focus to images and video in political campaigns between 2012 and 2016 ultimately aligns with the natural progression of social media platforms into including more stimulating, visual content (like memes). The intentional framing of a political standing through memes and visual content is somewhat of a new phenomenon, but draws upon the principles of propaganda, a notion not new to the modern world. It’s simply more subtle, and subliminal. The use of memes in political strategies is effective if widely and virally shared, deconstructed, appropriated and ultimately consumed by the general public. Those who inhabit a “shared sphere of cultural knowledge”, within a digital community, are catered to through somewhat of an “insider-knowledge” that separates them. Palmer’s Palmy Army, which grew to 8000 members in less than a week in the summer of 2018, is in itself, a microcosm wherein Palmer targets the typically-young, “edgy” meme enthusiasts, attempting to create a Palmer-positive political discourse through absurd memes. The more absurd, strange, bewildering; the more attention and, therefore ironic votes, Palmer seems to attract.

Distraction

It seems no coincidence that the absurdity of Palmer’s posts increases alongside growing political scandals. The collapse of his mining business Queensland Nickel and the subsequent loss of 800 jobs and a federal court case saw his Twitter utterances grow even more absurd, a type of vaudeville and a grossly entertaining deflection from his name in an infamous spotlight. “Vinegar chips are the best”, Clive says, all the while the liquidation of his business goes seemingly unnoticed by a demographic that fails to see beyond the memes.

https://theconversation.com/the-meme-ification-of-politics-politicians-and-their-lit-memes-110017

Enli, G 2017, 'Twitter as an arena for the authentic outsider: Exploring the social media campaigns of Trump and Clinton in the 2016 presidential election', European Journal of Communication, vol 32, no 1 pp 50-61

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The Atlantic Wall, Cliffs of Moher Ireland [OC] [4032x3024] - snika809

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The last light of day

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This is Tam-Tam. I met him in Kyoto.

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[OC] [1586x1983] A Canyon in Þórsmörk. No birds or bananas in this one for scale, sorry. - AlexSkiesUntold

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It’s like peering into my own life

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super blep