What is TikTok?
TikTok, also known as Douyin (Chinese: 抖音), is a Chinese-made video sharing application similar to Musical.ly. In Asia, the US and other parts of the world, TikTok is a leading short video platform where people can post 15-second short videos set to music, dancing, often lip-syncing, doing a trick, or acting out short skits. The app offers users video templates, visual effects, live-streaming, and also the standard social features like followers, hashtags, likes and comments.
Over the past two years, TikTok has become super popular among teenagers, and many videos have become blockbusters and begun to go viral beyond the platform, racking up millions of views.
“The app recently passed six million users in the United States, according to a report from the market research firm Sensor Tower. As of Friday, it ranked No. 4 among free apps in Apple’s app store, ahead of Snapchat, Netflix and Facebook Messenger. Globally, the app, whose Chinese version is called Douyin, had 500 million monthly active users as of July, making it bigger than Twitter and about half the size of Instagram.” from Roose (2018)
Apart from lipsynching and dancing, some of the popular videos are “cringe,” which means painful and embarrassing that a viewer can’t help but laugh. These videos create a truly pleasant social network where young people can share and act silly with their friends. However, watching too many these videos in a row can feel like you’re about to have a brain freeze. They’re incredibly addictive.
Why is TikTok so addictive?
From biological psychology’s angle
TikTok is an app full of youngster posting exciting content to the internet with zero self-awareness or shame. That’s what may lead to the success of TikTok. As of August of 2018, there are more than 500 million active users with average daily usage time of nearly 60 minutes (more than Facebook's 40 minutes). Many heavy TikTok users even spend 3 to 4 hours a day watching videos. This has already become a widespread social phenomenon in China and has caused some negative impact. However, what most people may not be aware that the TikTok addiction problem is the outcome of sophisticated product designs.
Why do people get addicted to something? From biological psychology’s perspective, as someone uses something more and more, this behaviour is continuously strengthened and becomes an addiction. It’s not difficult to find that many people continue using alcohol or some drugs to seek pleasure and avoid displeasure despite obvious harm to their health, wealth, or relationships with someone.
In one of the classic experiments on addiction, researchers placed rats in boxes where they could press a lever to produce electrical self-stimulation of the brain (as illustrated in the above figure). Many brain areas that rats would work to stimulate and all those areas had axons that increase the release of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens (Kalat, 2015).
How do they make users addicted?
From product designers' angle
By making use of these principles of biopsychology, the programmers developed TikTok with some unique features that make TikTok particularly addictive.
- Immersive display: When the app is opened, the layout extends to the entire mobile phone screen. The status bar, time and battery display of the original operating system are all fade into the black background and become invisible. As a result, users often forget about the time and are totally immersed in the videos until they are exhausted.
- Fool-style user interface: User-centric product design makes user experience and interaction super simple and requires no learning curve at all. You don’t even need to sign up to start using TikTok. When the app is opened, the first thing that pops out is a video. It’s that simple and straightforward, and the user is directly rewarded with the stimulus in the shortest time at the very beginning. Besides, the video will automatically loop until you slide down to watch the next video. Even the gesture of sliding your finger down can be skipped because the system is able to switch to the next video for you automatically.
- Escape from life: There are no ads and news, and you don't need to feel the stress or anxiety in real life at all. There are mainly harmless weirdos trying to make each other laugh. TikTok is an oasis where people can remove their masks, let down their guards and escape from their daily lives from time to time. This is extremely tempting for modern people who are lingering in real life.
- Magical music and other tricks: Also, the background music of TikTok video usually is a composite of simple rhythm, repeated beats, and easy-to-remember lyrics. Just like "earworms", these catchy melodies continually repeat through users’ mind after it is no longer playing. These uncontrollable humming triggers users open TikTok to watch more and more videos.
- AI-based recommendation algorithm: Unlike YouTube, TikTok users are not allowed to see the playlist; thus they can never know what the next video is and rely on algorithms to recommend new videos to them. This kind of unknown and uncertainty provides extra stimulus to the users. Moreover, if users like a video, they can double click on the screen to mark a “like.” The application will then analyze their preferences and recommend more videos they might be interested in. As a result, each time TikTok users slide down to watch the next video, they can get instant and direct stimulation.
If things go on and on like this, TikTok users would not put down their phones until they become exhausted, just like rats press a lever thousands of times per hour for septal or lateral hypothalamic stimulation.
Why users can't live without TikTok?
From users’ angle
From the perspective of the communicator, we explored how TikTok developers design this mobile product to influence the audiences' behaviour. Now, we can apply the theory of uses and gratifications to discuss TikTok users' motivations, and how they seek out and use it as a medium actively gratify their needs.
The theory of uses and gratifications is beneficial to exploring these questions because its principle elements include people’s psychological and social needs as well as how media can gratify needs and motives to communicate (Chen, 2011). In our study, the use of TikTok relates to the satisfaction of needs of individuals, relying on Weibull’s (1985) structural model of media use. Weibull argued that individual needs lead people to use media to satisfy those needs, which in turn leads them to use that medium again because using it was gratifying. Media use that becomes habitual reinforces this relationship because people return to a medium they find gratifies their needs (Weibull, 1985).
The common motivations that individuals usually have to use the medium are social and affection, need to vent negative feelings, recognition, entertainment and cognitive needs (Katz et. al, 1974). From TikTok audiences’ point of view, they watch funny videos to kill time and relieve the pressure, so there are needs to entertain themselves and vent their negative feelings. Meanwhile, they interact with their idols and keep up with fashion trends in TikTok, thus there are needs for cognition, and social and affection. From TikTok content creators’ point of view, they gain attention by showing their talents, and there are needs for recognition.
What can we learn from TikTok?
The upcoming 5G era and the popularity of wifi make our social carriers gradually transform from pictures and texts into videos. A short video social product like TikTok provides a better solution for young users to meet their psychological and social needs, and record and share their lives.
As an exceptionally successful mobile product, there are many things that we can learn from it when we design online educational products.
- Understand next generation’s way of thinking and unique taste
- Reduce the barriers for content production, and support high-quality content producers to achieve decentralization of online education
- Provide easy-to-use interaction methods and gamified features to improve user's stickiness
- Occupy users' fragmentation time and scarce attention with “short” + “videos”
- Provide personalized educational products based on artificial intelligence technologies
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in his room” -from French Philosopher Pascal
There’s a line it seems between designing products that solve the world’s real problems and creating services that address social and emotional needs. Furthermore, we still need to achieve a balance between successful product design and design ethics.
References
- Chen, G. M. (2011). Tweet this: A uses and gratifications perspective on how active Twitter use gratifies a need to connect with others. Computers in Human Behavior, 27(2), 755-762.
- Kalat, J. W. (2015). Biological psychology. Nelson Education.
- Katz, E., Blumler, J. G., & Gurevitch, M. (1974). Utilization of mass communication by the individual. In J. G. Blumler & E. Katz (Eds.), The uses of mass communications: Current perspectives on gratifications research (pp. 19–32). Beverly Hills, CA: SAGE.
- Pinel, J., & Barnes, S. J. (2018, April). Psicobiologia. Pearson Higher Ed.
- Roose, K. (2018, December 3). TikTok, a Chinese Video App, Brings Fun Back to Social Media. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/03/technology/tiktok-a-chinese-video-app-brings-fun-back-to-social-media.html
- Weibull, L. (1985). Structural factors in gratifications research. In K. E. Rosengren, L.
About the Author
Vincent is a lifelong learner and tech enthusiast, who genuinely believes that education can make a difference and technology would play an increasingly important role in education. Before becoming a UBC student, he used to work for Pearson and VIPkid.com in China. Vincent is very excited to have a splendid studying journey to explore EdTech potential in the coming AI era.
Credits:
Created with images by rawpixel - "addict addiction african american" • Daniel Korpai - "untitled image" • Emre Karataş - "Winter photography" • Jeroen den Otter - "Creative books." • Hans - "glasses read learn" • Wendy Aros-Routman - "untitled image"