✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

How TikTok Holds Our Attention | The New Yorker

newyorker.com · 7,253 words · saved by 1 readers

On the popular short-video app, young people are churning through images and sounds at warp speed, repurposing reality into ironic, bite-size content.

Save this story Save this story Marcella is eighteen and lives in a Texas suburb so quiet that it sometimes seems like a ghost town. She downloaded TikTok last fall, after seeing TikTok videos that had been posted on YouTube and Instagram. They were strange and hilarious and reminded her of Vine, the discontinued platform that teen-agers once used for uploading anarchic six-second videos that played on a loop. She opened TikTok, and it began showing her an endless scroll of videos, most of them fifteen seconds or less. She watched the ones she liked a few times before moving on, and double-tap

Explore this link on the map →

related reading