TikTok: balkanization of the internet?

In addition to explaining to some boomers that influencers are not "non-working dredges" after all, recent scandal about Doris Stanković and her unserved restaurant dinner did not bring us much: for the umpteenth time, the elderly found out that today's youth are engaged in nonsense, neoliberal commentators that everything is the state's fault, and marketing experts got the opportunity to present the banal truths of the advertising industry to the media as the pinnacle of expertise. Lulled into their own preconceived attitudes, most of them missed a small genre shift in the collective production of a big media story. Namely, for the first time, a story of this scale did not move into the mainstream from Facebook statuses, Instagram profiles or tweets of famous people, but jumped from TikTok. There was a time: anyone who knows someone older than 11 and younger than 18 years old probably knows who Charli D'Amelio, Loren Gray or Baby Ariel are today. In the countries of the so-called region, the Chinese application has overtaken WhatsApp, Messenger and the rest of the competition in the number of downloads in recent months, and Doris Stanković is just one of countless versions of local influencers who watch tutorials, edit video clips and imitate their American idols every day. We are not talking about the "countries of the region" by chance: under the hashtag "Balkans" TikTok finds a figure of 8,3 billion views of various videos, and for comparison, #Serbia has just over 2 billion, #Croatia a little over a billion, #Bosnia and # black people a lot less... Just like trap girls or hip-hop, in other words, TikTok fills the old idea of ​​a "common cultural space" with the content of new pop-cultural genres, only that these genres are still low enough to slip under the radar of eminent culturologists. And with that series of clips in which Doris Stanković shamed a restaurant from Poreč, after all, there was a hashtag #balkan, but that little thing - like a number of others - almost none of the professional commentators were overly interested.

Perhaps because the Balkans is, after all, only a small part of the huge global story: the expansion of TikTok in recent months and years is fascinating even in the context of the super-propulsive "big tech" industry. From a very simple idea - which boils down to offering tools for editing images and sound to users, so that they could then create mini-spots in their own rooms, launch challenges, direct skits, record split-screen duets or launch amateur advertising campaigns - grew serious business empire. The Beijing company ByteDance was founded only eight years ago, and its social network Douyin - the first incarnation of the later TikTok - entered the market there only in 2016. The development strategy from the beginning included global expansion: the very next year, Douyin was introduced to America under the name that gave it in the west and now we know, and a year later ByteDance buys the competing application Musical.ly. After that, there's no stopping. Due to the stricter Chinese regulation of the Internet, Douyin and TikTok will continue to live parallel lives, with different content and users, but the success is equally incredible: the eastern variant has gathered half a billion users, the western twice as many. Both saw their biggest boom during the lockdown and pandemic, when TikTok officially became the most popular app in the world, and ByteDance, valued at $75 billion, became the most successful start-up globally. Or, in the words of owner and founder Zhang Yiming: "TikTok is what comes after Facebook."

Naive criticism, old ideas

It could be said that - simply - new generations are coming: boomers are stuck on Facebook, Twitter is smart and arguing, and the elderly are slowly discovering Instagram, so TikTok remains a hidden networked corner for (the) youngest. Despite the playful youth and all those stories about revolutionary business innovation, however, that social network is woven by long-known pop-cultural patterns. The idea of ​​giving creative "tools" to anyone with an Internet connection and the euphoric release of creative potential is not at all new: in director Dalibor Matanić's accusations of dilettantism, we hear only a distant, banal echo of what, say, Dubravka Ugrešić established ten years ago from a lofty position denounced by the author as "karaoke culture". Just as the ridiculous prejudice about influencers who "just turn on the camera" renews the first, naive critics of reality shows: convinced that they are watching ordinary and formless "reality" on television, unaware that this reality is directed, edited and constructed.

At the same time, the construction of TikTok reality does not only take place on the profiles of teenagers, but also at the highest corporate levels: when the American Intercept recently revealed internal instructions to the moderators of the network to "hide" videos of users who are "fat or too thin" and who have "ugly facial expressions or deformities", it became a little clearer why the biggest stars of TikTok are so beautiful and attractive. The radical shortening of the video form, the influencer star system and, at the center of it all, good fun: these are all, in short, proven pop-culture tactics, some of them over a hundred years old. Journalistic accusations of spreading fake news, morally problematic content and causing addiction are also common, and a business model largely based on advertising is also expected. All in all, "what comes after Facebook"—as soon as the picture is expanded a bit—doesn't bring us much that we haven't seen before. But the key question is anyway different: the question is not what comes after Facebook, but where it comes from.

The era of the "splinternet"

The first Far Eastern application to disrupt the oligopoly of Western hemisphere Internet rulers like Google and Facebook may seem like a prototype of the realization of the American dream - especially because of the relaxed image of young entrepreneur Zhang Yiming - but it is clearly owned by a Chinese company. And it doesn't help that Yiming is not a member of the Communist Party, that he is relaxed and informal in public appearances, and that all the workers in the company address him by his first name, and it doesn't help that he "separated" the application into Chinese and Western versions. Finally, the media image of TikTok as a happy virtual merry-go-round for kids and teenagers does not help either: the reverse of that image in the American and European perception is increasingly occupied by the imagined scene of Chinese spies who collect from all those challenges, split-screen duets and silly dance moves biometric data and other user information, subtly spreading party propaganda around the world along the way. That's why, while we were having dinner with Doris Stankovic and learning the basics of influencing, America is discussing Trump's ultimatum to Zhang: either he will sell TikTok to an American company or the US government will shut it down. And while America debates Trump's threats, India has already banned TikTok: it was shut down about three months ago for an alleged espionage attack on the country's "sovereignty and integrity," with the network losing its biggest foreign market and nearly a quarter of its total users.

According to the increasingly popular new coin, what we are witnessing right now is the beginning of the era of the "splinternet" - a global Internet divided by impenetrable walls into smaller geopolitical areas - and the bans and fragmentation of TikTok are dictating the pace of this fragmentation. It is not easy to say how accurate these dystopian predictions are, but it is obvious that they are not entirely unrealistic: Trump is supported today by a significant number of politicians and commentators there who are otherwise not at all inclined to him. The decision to shut down TikTok would, admittedly, mean a rather dubious victory over China, achieved by taking over the "authoritarian" model of censorship and banning, but it seems that geopolitical fears are stronger this time than the ideals of free speech and the famous "American values".

If Trump really crashes TikTok, and then numerous other global applications and websites fall in a domino effect, it will also be the end of former dreams about the democratic potential of the world wide web. Its strong commercialization, carried out by political decisions under the pressure of capital, corroded the idea of ​​free sharing of information in the early nineties, and now this idea could finally and irrevocably fail. Which unexpectedly brings us back to the beginning of this story. Because while Doris Stanković and other local influencers on TikTok discover the Balkan hashtag-community, another popular name for the global "splinternet", which even Wikipedia notes, reads - quite ironically - "Balkanization of the Internet".

(bilten.org)