Is TikTok Making Us Less Creative?
At first glance, TikTok has it all. It can teach you how to cook, make you laugh, help you find your next favorite band, or give you a great idea for your next party.
And TikTok is winning, it’s built for today’s short attention spans. The algorithm knows what we like, and it stuffs our faces with it. It’s the dominant social media of our time. Not to mention, it’s what the kids like most—and that’s usually where the smart money goes.
Because writing anything critical of TikTok will usually summon an old man yells at cloud image. We saved you the trouble, and did it for you.
There you go. Now that we’ve acknowledged the popularity and appeal of TikTok, all we ask is you hear us out on a hypothesis. Because if you peel back the onion on TikTok, we think there may be a dangerous truth staring us all in the face:
TikTok is making us less creative.
We’ve all heard the rumors of how Chinese TikTok is filled with educational and inspirational videos, while the American counterpart is filled with mind numbing shenanigans. But we here at Pulltab Sports don’t think the threat of TikTok is Chinese spy balloons or the geopolitics between two superpowers. Our hypothesis is that the true conceit of TikTok is watering creativity down to the lowest common denominator. TikTok’s assault on creativity is three-pronged and relentless.
#1 Picasso didn’t paint by numbers.
At its core, TikTok is a meme-based platform. It’s designed for participation and trends. The problem with this is it’s redefining creativity to be a paint by numbers proposition. TikTok is specifically designed to have millions of people sitting around saying, “If I take this trending sound, and mix it with this meme, I have a better chance of going viral (more on this later).” Can you imagine The Beatles making “Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band” by following a recipe that read:
Mix 50% music with 50% art
Must be under 40 minutes in length
Dress up in colorful British Army gear for the cover.
This is not how great things are made. In fact, that’s the opposite of what happened. The Beatles famously put in over 400 hours and 129 days to make the record. As Rolling Stone described the Fab 4’s unique creative choices, “turning their back so completely on what had made them famous.”
What TikTok does is masquerade true creativity with something that at best brushes against creativity. TikTok has more in common with karaoke or pickle ball. Its popularity makes sense in a day an age when participation medals seemed to be favored over anything resembling hard work. Peal back the layers and TikTok is about as creative as wearing red or sending a dozen roses on Valentine’s Day. TikTok creativity is check the box creativity.
It takes a while to realize this because TikTok looks very creative. For the weirdest metaphor ever let’s look at the annual Peep’s diorama contest where people make things out of the marshmallow delights popular around Easter. TikTok creative is doing a Peep’s diorama, it’s about play and participation. It’s fun, and interesting. “Hey everyone is doing the Peeps thing, we should do one too!”
What this fails to miss, is there’s another layer of creativity. True, raw creativity is whoever sat down at some point and said, “You know, we have these marshmallow things. They’re a little bit like Play-Doh. They come in all sorts of different colors. I bet people could stick them together with toothpicks. We should create a contest where people try to make art out of our marshmallows.” Brilliant!
True creativity isn’t easy, it’s hard. Okay, that’s not totally true. Sometimes it just happens. Sometimes true creativity starts on a whim or as a joke, or overcommitting to a bad or odd idea. But the difference between true creativity and whatever TikTok is doing to us, is true creativity is denim cut from whole cloth. At best, TikTok creativity is bedazzling your jeans.
#2 Don’t Mistake a Happy Accident for Going Viral.
The engine that fuels TikTok is millions of people that wants to be instant Internet famous. Everyone is chasing views and likes and blue checkmarks. The difference with virality on TikTok is that it has more in common with getting caught up in the wake of a trend than making something from scratch. TikTok creative is built to fit into the feed. Think about a few of the people famous on TikTok, and ask yourself if you’re going to care about any of them in 5 years. While there are certainly exceptions to the rule (@silb0017 we see you!), most of the TikTok stars will be forgotten because for most TikTok creativity is one hit wonder meets one note execution. It’s the reason most successful people on TikTok must do the same thing repeatedly to appease the algorithm. When by contrast, any successful rock band knows that the second album shouldn’t be the same as the first . . .even if it the first record was platinum. Even “The Joshua Tree” needed “Achtung Baby” to keep growing.
The success of TikTok makes total sense at a time when meme culture has most people wanting to fit in more than they want to stand out. Every high school sporting event these days is designed to have a USA-Out or White-Out or Wear-Your-Favorite-Jersey-Out. It’s as if we’re no longer capable of making decisions for ourselves. Or far worse, we’re letting China tell us what we should do next.
There is a true randomness to going viral on TikTok, which is another telltale sign that this is a different breed of creativity. TikTok has zero in common with the Sundance Film Festival, or Art Basel or the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville. TikTok creativity is built more like the Ice Bucket Challenge. The problem is, people are mistaking the person who gets the most views doing the ice bucket challenge as the creative one, instead of the person who caught a bolt of lightning and came up with the Ice Bucket Challenge concept in the first place. TikTok has taken creativity from a concept based proposition (i.e. start with an idea) and reduced it to a popularity contest, and guess who usually wins (even in today’s woke world) a popularity contest . . .the prettiest people doing the cutest little dances. Sound familiar?
#3 Scrolling is Oxy-Contin.
Want to be less creative? Grab your phone and start scrolling.
There is nothing more paralyzing to the creative process, than to mindlessly up-thumb your way through what everyone else is doing. You don’t get creative by watching what everyone else is making. There’s a reason people come up with big ideas when they’re jogging, or in the shower, or swimming in the pool. Making something from scratch, and finding an idea or concept often requires getting off balance to open your brain. It’s like walking while chewing gum or patting your head while rubbing your stomach.
Scrolling through endless videos of people all doing the same thing and then thinking about how you can do that thing 5% better is creative, but it’s near-beer creative of a lower proof. It too often puts a pacifier in the mouth of creativity and dumbs it down.
So next time you’re trying to be creative, here’s a few tips: set down your phone. Think. Take the worst idea you can think of and try to reverse engineer it into something that might work. Start with a concept. Find a problem to solve. Think of something that breaks your heart and try to find a solution to it. Because if we keep scrolling our way through life, we’re going to reduce music to karaoke, art to paint-by-numbers, and sport to pickleball.
Sure, it’s fun, fast and easy, and everyone can play. But it’s selling creativity short.
