Christianne West

101064270

DIGH2705B

Dr. Michael Mopas

Carleton University

March 3rd, 2023

Influenced; Tiktok and Instagram

As a person born in 1999 stuck in between the Gen Z’s and Millennials, social media has been a

constant for most of my conscious life. I was given permission to create a Facebook when I was

in fifth grade and long before this I can remember using YouTube long before that to watch

Rhianna’s Unfaithful music video. Of course as the years go by, more and more platforms are

created and we are starting to see the patterns in the objectives of these platforms. The main

objective being sharing. Sharing pieces (or in influencers cases, all of) our lives with friends or

even the world. Although when I first created my Facebook page it was solely to be able to play

Petville with my friends, I would still say that this was a form of sharing nonetheless; our pets

and the communities we built, were a reflection of us. This statement can be amplified ten-fold if

we bring Sims into the conversation as well. All these platforms give us different ways to share

ourselves and consume content relevant to us. Fast forward to 2023 and last week I averaged a

total of 7 hours and 7 minutes of screen time on my phone and spending a total of 42 hours and

23 minutes on what Apple constitutes as “Social”, in seven days. With this in mind, in this essay,

I will reflect on my consumption of social media through the platforms of Tiktok and Instagram

and how they (objectively) consume my life.

 Tiktoks stats from last week are even more embarrassing, out of those 42.5 hours, 25.5 of

them were spent on Tiktok. Since the beginning of the Covid19 pandemic, Tiktok has become

part of my every day routine, and funny enough, when it first came out I refused to download it,

knowing it would do exactly what it did when I eventually succumbed. In the recent years, I have

noticed I spend less time watching movies or tv shows and I will opt for Tiktoks instead where I

would “go down he rabbit hole” and find myself sat on my couch without even realizing that

three hours has passed and it is dark outside. I would say the main reason for me spending this

much time on Tiktok is because of the specific content it gives me. The Tiktok algorithm gives

my “for you page” the perfect balance between KPop, KDrama, cooking and fashion and beauty

content, only showing me things relevant to my past liked, saved and shared videos. My sense of

identity, which can be said to be defined by my experiences, is exhibited in my “for you page”. I

enjoy consuming the content that makes me feel happy, humours, and especially heard and

understood.

In Bourdieu’s ideas in The Sense of Distinction, “find in smart sports and

games, in receptions, cocktails and other society gatherings not only intrinsic satisfactions and

edification but also the select society in which they can make and keep up their 'connections' and

accumulate the capital of honourability they need in order to carry on their professions”

(Bourdieu, 1984), this quote can be a parallelism of my sense of identity and community on

Tiktok. With the help of the Tiktok algorithm, I have positioned myself to be subjected to

content that not only satisfies me but also upholds my connections and honourability. In

Bourdieu’s case, the author refers to the members of the professions and their intents toward

their carrying on their professions. In my case, I am hoping to maintain my connections and

honourability to my position as a KPop stan, specifically BTS, my position as an ARMY and I

do this by interacting with other armies and posting BTS content from time to time on Tiktok.

With Tiktok being the place I go to for consumption and (minor) exhibition, I would say

Instagram is the place where one goes to “show themselves off”. I made my Instagram account

in 2014 when it was just somewhere to post terribly filtered photos for close friends to see, my

one bargaining chip with my parents to get permission to download it was that my account was

private. Being 15 years old with such easy access to a more public social media world than

Facebook, it was exciting to wonder of all the new possibilities that came with a new social

media platform. Quickly trends started forming, the more people you met the more followers you

would gain, it started to matter how many likes your photos got and even who liked or

commented on who's photos (back when Instagram had its “following” tab showing you every

post the people you follow liked or commented on). Instagram became a place of farces,

strategically curated poses, and behind screen jealousy. I would spend hours looking at posts

from people I follow, friends and celebrities alike, comparing the lives they were posting to my

real life one and hoping the life I portrayed on Instagram appeared as “cool” as theirs did.

Much like Malcolm Gladwell’s The Coolhunt, where readers are told of best friends

Baysie and DeeDee and the chase of what it is to be “cool” through fashion and trends,

“Everyone else made his decision overwhelmingly because of the example and the opinions of

his neighbors and peers.” (Gladwell, 1997), Instagram came to be grounds for decision making.

We became influenced by the people we followed and what they let us see and also influenced

by the thought of their opinions on what we let them see and this carried into our everyday life, I

saw Kylie Jenner wearing suspenders and fishnet tights so I started wearing suspenders and

fishnet tights under my ripped jeans. Growing through adolescence with this as a big part of life
created problems in my relationship with my sense of identity. Sometimes this makes it hard to

differentiate between social media life and real life, you do not know what parts of yourself that

you are publishing to the world is the true you or just what you want people to see.

Being 24 years old now, the longing for the generals validation has subsided but I still find

myself wondering from time to time if the people that see what I post is going to be “cool” or

funny. With this being said, the era of social media in society we are in emulate Gladwell’s

notions regarding thrifters, “The innovators do get their cool ideas from people other than their

peers, but the fact is that they are the last people who can be convinced by a marketing campaign

that a pair of suède shoes is cool. These are, after all, the people who spent hours sifting through

thrift-store bins. And why did they do that? Because their definition of cool is doing something

that nobody else is doing. — It is not possible to be cool, in other words, unless you are in some

larger sense-already cool, and so the phenomenon that the uncool cannot see and cannot have

described to them is also something that they cannot ever attain, because if they did it would no

longer be cool. ” (Gladwell, 1997). Our definition of being cool is acting as if we do not care

about being cool and despite us thinking that we do not worry about what others think of us, we

are still influenced by them and the other ideas we see on Instagram.

Social media presence in my life poses different sets of problem and joys. I enjoy the use

of social media and I probably use it as a means of escape more than anything but I do have

moments where I want to delete it all. I wonder what it would be like to disappear from social

media, ghost myself from that world and it’s expectations. The consumption of the content that

happens when I watch Tiktok videos or scroll through Instagram is not necessary to my life,

especially my well-being or happiness, and if anything, sometimes it brings more sorrow than

joy. In thinking this, going back to my copious amount of screen time, those clocked hours could
be seen as concerning. It makes me think of all the things I could be doing instead of spending

time on social media, taking more time to take care of my physical and mental health, spending

more time outside or doing activities, all things that would positively contribute to my life. The

risk versus reward with social media is seen as not worth it by many people in the world, and

after this reflection, I feel a touch more motivated to discover what my life would be like if I stop

consuming social media content.

References

Bourdieu, P. (1984) ‘The variants of the dominant taste’ in Distinction: A social

critique of the judgement of taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp.

283-295

Gladwell, M. (1997) ‘The Coolhunt’ in The New Yorker found at:

http://www.gladwell.com/pdf/coolhunt.pdf