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@selfieculture-leah
TikTok drag
Lipsyncing has strong ties to drag performance, and is now also closely associated with TikTok. We could read ventriloquism and imitation in the app as a kind of gender play. The specific way this performance is mediated by repurposing audio literalizes the citationality of gender as a performance and embodiment.
"The O.C." co-stars Rachel Bilson and Melissa Clark return to the spotlight to rewatch the series together and host other co-stars, writers, and producers to discuss it with them.
It's interesting to see celebrities retroactively narrative a time in their life that was always public and mediated for them.
This is a trend of self-documentation where you share obejcts that you own and like. Good neoliberal subjects are frequent consumers, and this trend definitely performs consumption-- the reports are weekly, and so the objects-- and therefore the self(ie)s-- are constantly updated.
Does this challenge the notion of a self as a brand? How does the pressure to always put out new content interact with the need to appear cohesive and consistent?
Does this selfie of Gordon Ramsy say anything about gordon Ramsy, or is his fame rendering his image kind of static, and instead doing narrative work for the initial poster?
This superimposing of reactions onto original videos creates ambiguity for a viewer- what is the primary text, if there is one?
Imitation publics, legibility, difference
in "TikTok Imitation Publics" Michell writes, "the demand for repetition is made explicit: the viewer is called to act, repeat the behavior they witness, and as a result, participate as a legible subject within a dialog or community."
This idea of legibility raises questions for me about who can imitate whom-- by lip syncing, for example-- and when this imitation occurs across differences in gender and race when does imitation end up performing/inscribing difference.
embrace of self-pleasure: flooding the senses in the solo-scroll
Buck- Morss's description of phantasmagoria (as quotes in Saraswati's "the neoliberal selfie" says that social media addicts us by "flooding the senses" to the point of "alter[ing] consciousness" (10). There's something about people on TikTok recording and posting videos from the same posture that they watch them in. They might be on their back or their side with their head on their pillow and their phone very close to their face. This sort of celebrates the mind-numbing trance we might fall into with our eyes glued to a screen: "the intoxication of phantasmagoria itself becomes the social norm" (Saraswati 11).
It also performs a private, end-of-day ritual of binge-scrolling-- a form of self-pleasuring-- which the poster might return to after their video is recorded. It's like we get a view of each other 'mid-act.'
TikTok audio trends, video loops, "refrain"
Alexander Cho writes in "Queer Reverb: Affect, Tumblr, Time" that, "[r]efrain is repetition, a scoring of affect fed back on itself, a way of apprehending that is not beholden to straightforward formulas of signification" (51). The refrain allows a "flow of affect" (Cho 44) to occur "between elements devoid of so-called natural affinity” (Cho 51).
Viral audios on TikTok perform this linkage between content that would otherwise lack any natural affinity. Often, the affect signified by a song carries the message of a video, allowing the viewer to read how they are supposed to feel about what is being depicted.
The TikTok mobile app automatically replays videos from the beginning until you scroll to another one, and this has led creators to make scripts for videos that logically loop back on themselves, so that you can almost not realize your back at the beginning. If you put your phone down with a video playing, you will be subjected to an "incessant refraining" (Cho 51) of audio-- ironically, this instance of refrain might actually interrupt the flow of affect that one experiences as a TikTok user.
Everything you need to know about optimising your content for search on TikTok
SEO= search engine optimization.
According to this webpage, text-on-screen that appears within the first 1-5 seconds of the video is most likely to generate key words and search tags.
To get around censorship of political content, some TikTok users who want to speak about Palestine use strategies like delaying use of certain words until later on in the video, or editing the closed captioning in their video so that it doesn't include words like "Gaza." This might evade shadowbanning and other forms of cencorship, but it would also make critical commentary on Palestine unsearchable. If the point of this technology is to make TikTok operate like a search engine, then these efforts to keep videos up on the app might actually contribute to the oppressive nature of the algorithm by ensuring that when someone searches terms like "Palestine" they don't see videos that are politically outspoken.
The mismatch of closed captioning and audio also poses obvious problems for accessibility.
oppressive algorithms and the faltering phantasmagoria of TikTok search highlights
TikTok's search highlight is AI technology that generates hyperlink search terms by scraping the comments section. I've noticed that lots of videos with these search highlights also have comments pointing out the search term as comedic or ironic or incongruous with the video's content.
This reminds me of Saraswati's analogy of phantasmagoria and the magic lantern in "The Neoliberal Selfie. " She says, "the agency of the trickster in the digital phantasmagoria is being usurped and absorbed by the magic lantern" (11-12), meaning that the technological manipulation of social media is not controlled by the users, but by the technology itself. I would argue that in this case the conspicuous glitches in TikTok's search highlights reveal the magic lantern in a way and usurp the illusion of the algorithm's neutrality and infallibility.
When racism is done in the name of protecting certain communities, efforts to counter it end up forcing individuals to put their marginalized identities on display and they face more vulnerability, not less.
In Winnipeg, an electric menorah was taken down "preventatively" before Hannukah, because our mayor thought that Palestinian protestors might deface it. In response, some of us held a public menorah lighting and said a prayer for Palestine, and decided to post a selfie to say "this is who has been in your streets and in your ears-- Palestinians and Jews, side by side." Our faces were the message. This screenshotted, edited and reposted version had me rethinking visibility as a strategy in activism.
In her chapter on "Collage" Poletti interprets a Genzlinger's critique of memoirs as this: "in its performative mode, the narrator of an autobiography must exorcise the masturbator if they are to successfully interpolate an audience to their utterance" (120).
Does this style of video come across as a form of self-pleasuring? Something about this makes me feel like the pleasure of the performance is in the self-gaze. Does content on this platform fall under the same moral scrutiny as memoir? How does this content resist such critiques?
Lewis Capaldi's TikTok presence is unexpectedly intimate, messy, and random. Could we think of his social media presence as creating a sort of break or liberatory "failure" from celebrity as an identity performance? His online account has a feel of 'open access' to him as a person and isn't limited to his music or his fandom. On the one hand this free/close up access to Capaldi (he is sometimes shirtless and/or lying in bed with the phone close to his face at an angle as though he was just scrolling for pleasure) seems to put more of himself 'out there,' but on the other hand his lipsyncs seem more about participating in the play/pleasure of mimicry and performance. In this way, Capaldi creates intimacy that is based on a public process of fragmentation, or stitching-together, of the online self.
Selfie x Celebrity
How has the ubiquity of social media, podcasting, and other self-produced content shifted the nature of celebrity and fandom?
Naomi Klein brings up the concept of doppelgängers when thinking about online selves. Presumably, celebrities have always had a double in their public persona; so, are self-made depictions from celebrities a further fragmenting of the public self, or are they aimed at creating the appearance of cohesion between their celebrity and themselves?