Do we only exist if we are seen online? Credit: LouiseOrwin.com
As a 16-year-old girl living in New York City, I’m part of a cohort that’s often talked about — as a matter of head-shaking concern among politicians, academics, and journalists — but rarely heard from: as creatures with greater agency and more serious ideas than the older generation might assume.
You hear about us as being hopelessly in thrall to the infinite scroll of social media; obsessed with micro-influencers whose fame doesn’t even last 45 seconds, let alone 15 minutes; and ever on the verge of falling into eating disorders or self-harm as a result of the images and ideas that flash before our truncated attention spans. We are the “anxious generation”, mind-controlled by apps designed to be as addictive as possible. More specifically, we are framed as victims of a Chinese app called TikTok.
To be clear, the TikTok-girl crises I sketched above are all too real. But the older generation’s discourse around them more or less ignores what the people who are in need of rescue have to say for themselves. As a result, it misses the granular details that could make for better and more realistic reforms, if reforms are needed.
Famehungry — a new piece of performance art about TikTok being staged at the Soho Playhouse this week as part of the New York City Fringe Festival — is a good example of how such critiques go wrong. In it, the London-based theatre artist Louise Orwin explores the big question — TikTok, good or evil? — in a multimedia format that streams simultaneously on TikTok Live and integrates the app in interesting ways with the in-person performance. Audience members who still have the tabooed and sort-of-banned app can like or comment as the play unfolds; everyone sees Orwin acting into her phone and her screen-view is projected onto the stage. It could have been fun, but the performance was chaotic and overwhelmed by a too-on-the-nose “concern message” about people like me.
Orwin’s breakout performance in 2014 was a project called Pretty Ugly that examined the online identities of teenage girls. Famehungry covers some of the same territory, asking about the app’s effects on the mental health, self-esteem, and happiness of girls and young women.
The new work opens with Orwin sprawled onstage in various positions illuminated only by the glow of her phone. It’s a commentary on the social-media era: we only exist as we are seen online. I could relate to it some; it reminded me of staying up late with only the light of my phone in my room. She is wearing a red Adidas track suit and clashing neon green bodysuit, and she writhes around while loud and jarring ambient music plays. Next she sits down at a desk covered in pink hair and starts babytalking and making scrunchy faces into the camera. “Just waiting for a few more people to join”, she repeats, over and over and over. She also performs a few TikTok stereotypes, like waving and saying hi, drinking from her Stanley, and eating stuff off her acrylic nails (eating videos are called mukbang, from the Korean words meaning “eat” and “broadcast”).
Orwin explains during the play that she joined TikTok because she missed performing live during the pandemic, and she discovered that one of her former students, a 15-year-old named Jax Valentine, had 20,000 followers. She wondered if she could get up to that number, which was more than she’d ever achieved in a theatre in real life. During the performance, she’s hoping to achieve 20,000 likes and promises she’ll “do something amazing” for the audience if she does. Jax makes live guest appearances on another screen to coach her.
A long middle section of the play talks about what Orwin likes about TikTok. She picks the weird, outlandish, or simply brainrot videos — people running in slow motion, girls dancing in turtle-outfits — and says she likes to see all this human variety from around the world. She believes the app “democratises the flow of information” and “makes space for marginalised communities”. But she offers this praise while walking on a treadmill, speaking in an increasingly frantic voice, and she follows it up with all the rules of how you have to act to be liked, implying that the app only rewards certain types of behaviour and punishes others: turtle-dancing, yes; “fake smoking while covered in fake blood,” no. (I’m glad that content moderation prevents violent videos.) She also does attention-getting things like violently splash her face with water or eating with food hanging out of her mouth — more mukbang. During her final dance number, she pours a pink drink that looks like a strawberry Yoo-hoo over her head.
The play concludes with the artist venting mixed but mostly negative feelings. The attention is nice, Orwin thinks, but other than that, TikTok is “a black hole of nothing”. It’s “mostly people doing the same thing over and over again”, and she is disgusted with herself for participating. She also seems to be disgusted — or at least, negatively impacted — by many of her previous non-online performances. She tells the audience about ones in which she’d asked men to hit her or done other self-destructive or sexually gross things. Talking at the end with her back to the audience, she says she’s tired of “the precarious way I earn a living”, “the constant checking and rechecking”, the “dystopia”, and “making work in a system that’s broken”. She wonders why she’s doing it, and if she should have planned for her future or gotten a real job instead.
Yet what Orwin portrays goes so far beyond what the generally young, female user base of TikTok is like. I was insulted that a grown woman would put on an act that mocks young girls in the name of spotlighting their supposed misery. Orwin is a performance artist, exaggerating to make an effect, but the baby voices and the determination to humiliate herself seemed more about her than about most of us. If someone on TikTok says they’re “just waiting for a few more people to join”, it’s because they’re legitimately waiting. Sometimes people do rage-bait — act obnoxious to get attention — but the influencers who are famous and making money aren’t the ones doing that. They’re usually offering positive messages and running real businesses.
I also thought maybe that Orwin was on the app for the wrong reasons. She went there because she was “fame hungry”, and all she cared about was getting followers. And she searched out the weird live content from around the world because that was her personal preference. I sometimes see that kind of content advertised in my feed, but I don’t watch them. My followers are mostly my friends, and I don’t obsess about getting more of them from among the strangers online. I use TikTok as a side tool in life; it’s meant to be fun. I capture fun moments with friends in nice outfits, take clips of interesting city views, and follow fashion, health, and beauty content. I didn’t mind deleting the app because as long as everyone was off of it, I wasn’t missing anything.
Many young women have mental-health problems, to be sure, but those result from all kinds of social and personal factors, not just TikTok. Some people might act foolish and inappropriate (especially when they have an audience of one to five people, who are probably just bots), and that isn’t good for them. But it’s also a mistake on that person’s part, not solely the fault of the app. Orwin herself is a good example, because she tells us she has been making disturbing and self-harming work long before TikTok existed.
I don’t know what danger the Chinese ownership of the app truly presents to kids, but I do think it’s dangerous to condemn something you don’t know much about, or whose positive attributes you’re unable to see. I stay mentally healthy despite the stress of the junior year of high school by getting a lot of exercise, eating real food, and spending time with my friends. Orwin poured soda into her Stanley, mocking a teen-girl cliché. I carry a Stanley everywhere, I admit, because I go from school to sports practice, and I get headaches when I’m dehydrated. Mine is always full of water enhanced with Liquid IV electrolyte powder, which is good at preventing them. It really works — I learned about it on TikTok.
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SubscribeThis is like reading a positive review about the pot written by the frog sitting in it as it comes to a boil. You don’t have to have Zoomer daughters like I do to find this young woman’s gleeful misapprehension of SM’s brain-altering dopamine loop, digital tracking, and other unrevealed data collection enterprises to be totally depressed reading this. We’re not just worried about Gen Z because they’re lost but because they think they’ve been found.
As much as social media as a whole can and indeed very often does seem to crowd out other activities, we’ve had these moral panics before, with TV, then video-nasties, then computer games, then the internet. The teenager who wrote this lucid and thoughtful piece is part of a generation who’ll spend vastly more time interacting with and through devices than previous ones did, and as such will learn to use them as ‘side tools in life’. I’ve a child of the same age, and sure he spends a lot of time on his computer, but then again almost none vegging in front of the TV. By the time I was 16 I was drinking and so were my friends. Neither he nor any of his friends are. Well-adjusted kids will adjust well to change and new technology. Tiktok and other apps are doing vastly less harm to youngsters than adults locking them in their rooms for months or years on end in knee-jerk response to a virus that primarily harmed the very old, and I have a great deal of sympathy with a teenager who says that people shouldn’t condemn something they know nothing about.
I would feel a lot more confident that these kids are adapting well to new technologies if they would demonstrate even a rudimentary grasp of how, for instance, SM algorithms work. They don’t. And what’s worse is they really don’t want to know. All the while there is an epidemic of depression, self-harm, and a skyrocketing suicide rate among the author’s demographic. I’m not one for the “generational moral panic” dismissal of what appears to be a whole lotta scary unknowns. Panic seems the rational play here.
Perhaps these youngsters do have the “game” in a clearer, lighter touch perspective. For instance, Ticktock and like apps have certainly “played” the minds of older voting age participants and helped elect a dangerous fool to unfortunately, one of the most prominent positions of power and influence for the entire of humanity.
Maybe, but Biden’s gone now, thankfully. 🙂
So one well adjusted teenager who spends lots of time with her friends, eating good food and exercising a lot is the middle of the demographic of concern and therefore should inform policy?
Utter bobbins, hence why we dont ask 16 years olds to form policies or vote on them. The fears of the impact of social media arent based on some form of boomer fear of technology. Gen x, the parents, lived through this in the 2000s before today’s 16 year olds were even born. The concern is based on data, researched by the top social psychologists in the field who are all looking at the data and concluding similarly. The format of modern social media appears to have a significant deleterious effect on the mental health of specifically teenage girls.Thats on average, across the populaton and for those presumably at risk of negative effects. Not everyone falls into that category, like the author. A stint on a good quantitative university course would iron out these issues.
> Many young women have mental-health problems, to be sure, but those result from all kinds of social and personal factors, not just TikTok.
But social media is optimized and designed to exactrebate and feed the conditions that cause mental illness to grow.
> don’t know what danger the Chinese ownership of the app truly presents to kids,
The danger is that the Chinese government is able to create a realtime data map of where vast swaths of the American population is down to the foot and use that data in planning and carrying out attacks on US citizens as well as analyze logistical data to prepare for military action. Stealing confidential and personal data for resell on the black market is just icing on the cake to them.
>but I do think it’s dangerous to condemn something you don’t know much about, or whose positive attributes you’re unable to see.
I’m all for social media to an extent, I really think it goes up there with the printing press or radio as far as changes in communication medium and I recognize the good it has. It can be educational, it massively democratizes news reporting and information sharing, and it can be a valuable vector for learning. I also think that legislation and moral panic hand wringing are bad, except in the case of TikTok in particular due to national security concerns euclidiated above. Ultimately however I also don’t think that there exists the wisdom and maturity at 16 to take comprehensive stock of these things. I know plenty of 16 year olds that like to advocate how it should be fine for them to drink, that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
… maybe we should principally consider that every activity that stops you being in direct contact (not through a screen) with other life (friends, family, nature, farming, bugs, natural products (wood etc)…) makes you less alive as life only exists in contact with other life…
” … being staged at the Soho Playhouse this week as part of the New York City Fringe Festival … “
You spelled cringe wrong.
You could make an argument that in the Sixties ‘the young ones’ became the biggest victim group – but with more money to spend on things that gave then ‘satisfaction’. Social Media may have turbocharged the celebration of this victimhood.
But the real question is whether or not what the young have to say is worth paying attention to by ‘my generation’.
Stanley + Liquid IV electrolyte powder + TikTok… She forgot to mention jacket The North Face.
Agreed, the lager, kebabs and ketamine I was consuming as a teenager was much more healthy
Billy, you misunderstand me.
No I don’t, you’ve merely edited your original comment
My gut tells me you didn’t attend an art school in Manhattan.
I’ll have you know I went to Trinity College at Cambridge University!
Admittedly it was only to rewire the Masters Lodge
I used to be on usenet. Now *that* was awful!