Do you speak TikTok?
Why body language matters (again)
The energy that pours forth when flipping through TikTok videos feels fundamentally different to any other content platform. It has a physical quality that can be both strangely enchanting and frustratingly inscrutable. Until the moment it all starts to make sense.
To spend time with TikTok is to learn new visual vocabularies by osmosis. At some ill defined point you become fluent in TikTok, as this fascinating vignette (via Aaron Lewis) reveals.
Speaking TikTok is “more full bodied than regular English”. It doesn’t feel possible to say the same about Twitter or Instagram, or even Snap. TikTok creates a richer shared vernacular. Or rather, vernaculars. And what makes them so rich is that they are visual, active and expressive.
Body language is not typically associated with digital forms of interaction. Subtle physical cues don’t translate well on video. Working from home has further underlined the important role the body has in synchronous communication. It’s difficult to “read the room” when non-verbal cues are filtered through gallery view.
But this common observation undervalues the potential of the body. Or rather defines a platform’s value by its capacity to replicate face to face communication. The physical mode of communication being established by TikTok unlocks something new.
Bodies Carry Culture
Back in 1934 Marcel Mauss explored the importance of the body in defining and regulating cultural distinctions. He observed the difficulty English soldiers had marching to French buglers.
The unfortunate regiment of tall Englishmen could not march. Their gait was completely at odds. When they tried to march in step, the music would be out of step. With the result that the Worcester Regiment was forced to give up its French buglers.
“A manual knack”, Mauss suggested, “can only be learned slowly”. The English bodies were out of sync, but with time and effort they could develop the appropriate gait from their French counterparts. The difference would be legible enough to appropriate.
But what if these techniques of the body, in the words of the quoted TikTok user, are read through a private “filter in my head” composed of “layers and layers of references”. Is it possible to get in-sync if the underlying meaning is obscured? It’s all very well learning the dance, but if you don’t understand the subtle semiotics the dance is conveying, are you really performing it?
These unspoken references reveal why there is such a high level of shared consciousness between TikTok users, even when they don’t know, or follow, one another. There is a camaraderie in this private language, which also leads to the marshalling of boundaries when there is a sense that outsiders don’t really get it.
Intergenerational disputes over the value of Skinny Jeans and Middle Partings are not trite distinctions — they are flashpoints that reveal deeper, tacit cleavages. Because when language integrates the body then clothing and hairstyles are part of the syntax.
Creating language at scale
The visual vernacular of TikTok is vast. It spans everything from fashion to comedy to music to dance. Signifiers within these domains have always served to distinguish ingroups and outgroups. But what’s interesting about TikTok is not so much the diversity of domains it covers, but the way it enables shared language across domains.
Every platform has its own affordances which encourage a particular way of being. Instagram and Twitter encourage creators to build followings by being specific: performing a particular identity. But in doing so individuals become constrained by the expectations of their audience.
As Eugene Wei pointed out in ‘TikTok and the sorting hat’ TikTok is a social platform that doesn’t rely on your social network:
In the two sided entertainment network that is TikTok, the algorithm acts as a rapid, efficient market maker, connecting videos with the audiences they’re destined to delight. The algorithm allows this to happen without an explicit follower graph.
Creators are less constrained by what Facebook calls the ‘audience problem’ (simply put, that as the diversity of your audience increases the more difficult it becomes to share something relevant to everyone). On TikTok, creators are free to move between different interests and identities because they know that the content will always connect with the relevant audience (rather than just their own).
This results in greater levels of participation and interest across content verticals. Users are less likely to get stuck within categories, and more likely to discover new, adjacent worlds outside of the taste profile of their social network.
But if the content of TikTok is infinitely varied, the way that people engage with the content has a coherence — from the subtle visual codes of the comments section, to the common dance moves that are adopted across different trends.
On TikTok the substance of what you are consuming matters less than your ability to decode and engage in the underlying vernacular.
The distinctive codes of engagement are TikTok’s real point of difference rather than the specificities of the content available. Other platforms invite users to engage with user content in more linear, one dimensional ways, prioritising images, speech and text. This means that the content is legible to everyone, even if there is disagreement or disinterest in the substance.
But TikTok has unlocked a new visual-first language that draws on subtle aesthetic and physical cues that are less intelligible without prior context. This is part of the reason that Instagram Reels doesn’t resonate like TikTok. The creative tools may be the same, but the shared vernacular is absent.
Building bridges with the TikTok generation
There is evidence a new range of brands and products are leveraging these aesthetic codes to more successfully target the culture of which TikTok is emblematic. Ben Schott has dubbed these brands ‘Adorkables’
Whereas traditional brands strive to provide means of public self-validation (“I’m a Mac, I’m a PC,” “What’s in Your Wallet?,” “Because you’re worth it”) adorkables offer commercial opportunities for personal self-expression.
Like any successful TikTok creator, these brands produce products that are designed for participation before consumption. Users are encouraged to layer their own meaning onto the goods and integrate it into their own visual culture. The product that is consumed only makes sense within the context of the self-expression it instigates.
Millennial companies, conversely, obsess over the purity of their origin story and authenticity of their brand. They design for fandom and followers rather than re-appropriation and re-contextualization.
Speaking TikTok, then, requires more than an ability to understand these new visual codes, but a readiness to actively participate in them. At the heart of this is a willingness to be vulnerable; to accept it is impossible to control your personal or corporate narrative. The act of trying entirely misses the point.
Tom Hoy, @thoy
