The Metamorphosis of Youtube and Instagram During the Transition from the Movie to the TV: A ParaSocial Relationship with the People They Saw on the Screen
With TikTok, however, transcendence is exchanged for immanence within the app. Where Google wants to give you access to the world, TikTok promises to reveal your deepest desires. Youtube and Instagram’s interfaces are hyper-mediated control panels (with screens within screens and links exploding outwards) that let you traverse the seas of content, while TikTok’s is a full-screen diary of your unmediated inner self.
Take, for example, the transition from the cinema to TV that occurred in the mid-20th century and enabled moving images to enter our homes. Once constrained to the theater, this content began to live alongside us—we watched it as we got ready in the mornings, ate dinner, hosted guests, spent time with family. As moving pictures were taken out of the dark theater and placed in our domestic spaces, the mechanics of how we received, processed, and related to them changed. As newly engrained features of our dwellings—which Heidegger recognizes as deeply intertwined with our sense of being in the world—they took on a familiar casualness. Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl suggest in a paper titled “ParaSocial Relationships with the People they Saw on the Screen” that viewers started to develop a social relationship with the people they saw. Home audiences grew to see these mass media personas as confidants and friends, giving broadcasters the means to manipulate audiences at a more personal level.
Once, platforms sought to be device-agnostic, universal purveyors of content that would be accessible to anyone who might want it. As Kyle Chayka notes, this allowed companies to promise users that they could use any device to transcend particularities like nationality, identity, or class and “follow anything or anyone” they wanted when on the site. The logic behind the mission of this website is indicative of many of the ways it is intended to be used. Discussions have rarely focused on the specifics of our encounter with these platforms—the instruments used, context, or materiality.
Why Is This Video A Good Video? Reply to Rubio in the TikTok tame discussion section of the Slack Report on YouTube and other social networks
TikTok on Tuesday said it is beginning to roll out a new feature to add more context about how the platform’s algorithms recommend videos in your “For You” feed. With the new option, you can click on the share button on the video and then select the question mark icon dubbed, “Why this video.”
TikTok uses the same techniques as other social networks to surface personalized content for users in hopes that they will stay engaged and scrolling for longer. These are usually black boxes.
The bill was introduced last week by a trio of lawmakers. In a statement announcing the proposed legislation, Rubio accused TikTok of collecting data to “manipulate feeds” and blasted the app as a “CCP [Chinese Communist Party]-puppet company.”