TikTok and its mediatic split: the promotion of ecumenical user-generated content alongside Sinocentric media globalization

Abstract

TikTok has ousted Google as the world’s favorite online destination in 2021. As China’s first emergent social media app making its mark across the Global North and South, it has prompted a shift in our global mediascape. Following in the footsteps of YouTube and Instagram after it, TikTok is facilitating new identities through User-Generated Content (UGC) while challenging the hegemony of American-led platform culture. UGC analyzed in this article views it unabashedly as a youthful narcissism through which a form of self-reinvention online is created. This is culturally surmised as an intriguing new form of global creativity that I label ecumenical UGC. Yet, scholarship has largely examined TikTok through empirical and content analysis frameworks only, negating the compelling cultural studies issues evinced in this trendy media. In conjunction with discussions of TikTok’s meteoric rise, this article also probes how the Chinese company that owns this app bends several UNESCO media principles, creating its mediatic split with its twin, Douyin operating only in the PRC. By laying out this other path, one detects a shrinkage of cultural globalization in the pandemic era as TikTok becomes a carrier of ‘underglobalization’ flows, a disrupter and provider of algorithmic content, all going under not against older notions of global culture.