Living in a moment: Impact of TicTok on influencing younger generation into micro-fame

Abstract

In recent years since the creation of TikTok, there has been a rapid increase in the use of such applications by teenagers to gain popularity and cure boredom. The app was developed in China and is owned by Byte Dance. Initially called Musically, the advanced app, now known as TikTok, has 500 million monthly active users and is accessible in 34 languages. Followed by YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram, TikTok is the 4th most downloaded social app. Previous studies conducted show that such image focused apps lead to several mental health issues like body dissatisfaction, eating disorders, narcissistic personalities etc. The usage of this application has resulted in child pornography, cyberbullying and parental disengagement. The paper uses a pragmatic approach to examine indepth reasons behind TikTok becoming a sudden massive success amongst teenagers along with its positive and negative effects. Content analysis is performed on parents views and comments left as feedback at the app store for downloading this application. Qualitative data gathered is transcribed and codified to derive emerging themes. Focused group interviews with a few up and coming TikTok micro celebrities are conducted to explore their underlying thought processes, problems and other interesting facts about the application. The study proposes a conceptual framework as roadmap of TikTok micro-fame which could be used by other studies and researchers. The study substantiates a fact towards understanding the areas of further research in designing and developing the application from a functional as well as users perspective.