Finding ‘places to be bad’ in social media: The case of TikTok

Abstract

As an exploration of creative and countercultural people in inner-city Melbourne in the 1970s, Dogs in Space arguably provokes a question of twenty-first-century audiences: How would the characters of the Berry Street house, ensconced in ‘independent’ or ‘alternative’ music, express themselves in a very different world of twenty-first-century social media and the instant availability of recording and photographic technology in mobile devices? This chapter examines the TikTok platform through which users record and distribute short videos of themselves performing either by miming and/or dancing to songs or other soundtracks, responding to extant videos, or parodying popular genres including the TikTok genre itself. The question here pursued is whether it is possible to ‘subvert’ TikTok and use it as a framework for countercultural expression.