timing
I had drinks with a friend recently (hi, Ann) during which we talked about being over 30 on TikTok. I downloaded the app the way a lot of people did, on some bleak night last year when the inside of my head wasn't a good scene but neither were my usual social media outlets. I did this in part because, like I said, bad brains, but also because it felt like my duty as a culture reporter. I thought of it as a journalistic imperative, not something I might actually enjoy.
And at first it was exactly what you'd expect: hot teens doing dance challenges and bare-chested pretty boys mugging for the camera. Not offensive, but not engaging, either. But I had picked up somewhere that TikTok had a particularly suggestible algorithm, so for the first few weeks I trained it relentlessly-- swiping by anything that included the woah and clicking deeper onto the profiles of any videos featuring cute cats, queer women, and generally weird shit I found compelling. I followed a young Black potato farmer, an indigenous hoop dancer, a guy who was raising a cattle dog in the Irish countryside. (Also, this girl?)
TikTok quickly became, and remains to this day, my favorite social media app. This is not to say that it's perfect or that you can't find the same boring and/or vile shit there as on Instagram and Twitter, just that, for a variety of reasons, I've been able to curate a better experience on it. It feels a little like what I remember old-school Instagram feeling like: a window into other people's worlds, wide-open and fascinating.
One of my favorite TikTokers is a guy named Tyler who posts as @ghosthoney, and when he moved to LA last year I knew that I wanted to find a way to interview him about what he was making and how he thinks about his work. Tyler has a BA in fine arts but now he paints Pokemon and makes "silly internet videos;" he seemed like a very clear and interesting example of the way that being a digital creator means you have to be an auteur and also an entrepreneur, something I think about... a lot, as a freelance writer!! (Also as someone whose art takes the form of the YA novel, something not everyone considers an artistic medium.)
The profile I wrote of him is up on BuzzFeed today. It was really fun to work on, especially because I got to do my first in-person interview in eighteen months (masked, natch), and also hang out while they were doing the photoshoot, a blissful experience of being at work while not actually being required to work at all.
So please give it a read! But also, I truly recommend that you check out TikTok if it seems interesting to you. I will never make a TikTok-- that requires video editing skills, and I don't have them and I don't plan to acquire them-- but there's a lot of really good, fun stuff there. It's not just for teens! You're only too old for the things you decide you're too old for! How can you not want this or this or this or this in your life!!