What makes us TikTok?

TikTok is the most disruptive form of social media I've seen in my lifetime. The app is so popular that every other form has adopted some facet of it. No other app has made me feel like a victim of Stockholm syndrome. TikTok's effectiveness at hotwiring the brain is also its major selling point: the audio. Sitting on the couch and listening to my girlfriend scroll through her "For You" page, where the app shows users videos based on their viewing history, takes my brain to every imaginable location of the anthropomorphic soundscape. It's incredibly distracting, not just because of the diversity of sound assaulting my ears, but because I recognize ALL of it by now. The urge to sing, yell, or follow along is overpowering, to the point where I find myself doing long after I've closed the app. Music and sound strike deep chords within our neural wiring, and thus within human culture, so it's no surprise that TikTok is successful. I think that the app's timing was also fortuitous in hooking people into the habit. In the throes of the pandemic, when the world was isolated, the app made users feel less alone. The timing and the mechanism of content delivery, plus the ability to tap into our fascination with strangers, is a formula for instant addiction. Much like COVID, TikTok is not something the world is shaking off anytime soon.