How TikTok Changed the Social Media Narrative
Picture this. It’s March 2020, the global pandemic closed the gates to your social life and you’re locked between four walls dying of boredom. You download this new app because your best friend keeps sending you her dancing videos and you just want to see what her fuss is all about. After spending two days on it you’re already in a caloric deficit, judging people based on their birth chart and watching all the Sway- Hype House drama unveil like it’s your religion. Life as you know it will just never be the same and all it took was the download of the TikTok app.
Like most people in my generation, I am a social media addict. I live by my instagram feed, I keep my facebook funny and my linkedin clean and I will do the occasional Twitter rant. But I was bent on never getting on TikTok. Until last summer, when one of my friends started making TikTok videos and being cringe on it I considered myself at only 22 way too old to go on a kids app. I made fun of her for doing it and I laughed it everyday with her boyfriend, both of us sure she is just being a weirdo. Too cool to catch us on any musical.ly wanna be.
But July comes and I open TikTok, I start looking on my ‘for up page’ and see all the hot girl summer videos, all the body positivity and manifestation and I am driving so hard into everything that I may as well call myself a simp. A week after I am spending all my time on it, thinking of starting my own account and watching people become famous overnight. It’s as addictive as it comes and I was so there for it.
TikTok did not steal the show of social media apps overnight. It started with the younger generation, worked its way up to the adults and even touched our olders. It’s the future- feeding your small attention span with 15 seconds videos on every single imaginable subject on this planet. You could even say that it’s the new popular kid in school- with his ‘you don’t need an account to be on me’, ‘i got your for you page on point every time’, ‘ i am easy, fast and without too much effort’ charm. You’re prone to love it because it’s personal, raw and so into you that you cannot go away after getting on it.
Social Media began as this perfect wanna be visual mood board of one’s life. Tiktok is slowly changing the narrative to a more personal educational approach. It’s the youtube of the new generation- getting people famous overnight, making songs hits in just a second, setting the trends for the whole world to get into. Is faster, in your face and selling you the story without flinching a second.
It's the education of the young generation while keeping them authentic for me. It’s getting instant access to people who work in all domains of life. It’s the constant debate, social activism and keeping everyone entertained, but also on point with the reality of tomorrow. Is making people accountable for their bad habits. All of this is what makes TikTok the main character of the social media narrative at the moment. And in 2021 you better open an account, find out your rising, sun and moon placement, spread body positivity and find your representation. So say goodbye to the good old instagram and hop on the boat to the future. I swear you will find it worth the time. I know I did.
A plot twist in the making, Oana is living her 20s one drama at a time. Fiercely independent, occasionally witchy and always ready to debate feminism, you will find her either doing birth charts to her matches on Bumble or being a hot mess on Instagram. On any occasion, everything will be blamed on her water sign placements.
