Me! Me! Me!

There is some sort of urge we have to photograph ourselves. Not everyone, of course, but a large enough percentage of people photograph themselves to make it "a thing." Sometimes the reasons are clear: vanity, self-promotion, or convenience. We're vain things, humans, and deluded. Some people view themselves as a marketable commodity, and as such attempt with varying degrees of success to convert their likeness into money. Last, but not least, we're the handiest models.

Maybe that's all there is, but I feel as if there's something deeper. Some urge to self-expression. The same thing that pushes some people to journal, maybe, or write confessional memoirs, whatever.

What we've lacked, photographically, is the means to really do it. Taking photos of oneself is surprisingly hard. There's a lot of traipsing back and forth, a lot of fiddling with kit, and a lot of blunders. You get the hang of it after a bit, but it's not easy.

Hippolyte Bayard famously made a highly performative self-portrait of himself in the role of a drowned man, as a protest against Dageurre's un-earned success. He is not only a convenient subject, but (as he saw it) the actual victim, so the selfie here is especially on-point. He's protesting, he's showing off his chops as a photographer, and he's scratching that selfie/performative itch some people have.

Let's set that aside and think about twitter. Famously, twitter limits you to Very Short pieces of text. You can, and some of us do, clumsily work around that by chaining many "tweets" together, if it happens that you have thoughts that don't fit in 40 words. Regardless, this is the thing. It has, in a sense, enabled "blogging" for people who don't have much to say. In another sense, though, the medium has shaped the kinds of things that get said (and, perhaps, thought).

Twitter enables the joke, the dunk, the drive-by comment. It's unworkable for conversation, mostly. It's unworkable, mostly, for ideas that are non-trivial. It does encourage brevity, which is to its credit. The point is, though, that it shapes the way its users write. While it emulates the text message format from phones, it renders that form vastly more accessible, and it changes the audience from 1 to several billion.

It is a mistake to imagine that twitter is "blogs, but short" or any other analogy. It is in some ways like all those things, but at its core it is its own thing, shaping communication into new forms.

Which brings us around to TikTok.

TikTok is youtube for short videos of yourself, in the same way twitter is short blogs. Which is to say, it's not, it is its own thing, but you can trace the descent.

Youtube is pretty heavyweight. To make "content" for youtube credibly you have to have gear and skill. It's pretty hard to do well. TikTok isn't. TikTok allows pretty much anyone to make videos that are reasonable for TikTik. This is a combination of technology, which smooths the path, and social conventions which set the bar fairly low. Originality and creativity are valued, production values are not, in the same way that twitter values the ability to compress a good solid dunk into 280 characters.

TikTok is very very selfie-focused. It is entirely about scratching the itch to perform, with a side of vanity thrown in. It is a medium of communication which is largely incomprehensible to people outside the community. People can and do clumsily use it in comprehensible ways, as I use twitter, but the natural form of the thing is something else entirely. It's easy to dismiss it as stupid, trivial. Dumb bored kids making dumb little videos.

This is, in a sense, true. However it is also a cant, us olds don't get it. We're not supposed to. That is part of the point.

This, in the end, brings us around to my real point here: a trend on TikTok.

Apparently teens are dressing up and making-up to look (sort of) like Holocaust victims, possibly speaking from heaven(?), and they make videos that purport to teach about the Shoah. I am absolutely certain that many of these videos are awful. Some of them are probably overtly anti-Semitic, and many of them are probably so shallow and self-serving as to be legitimately and obviously viewed as disrespectful.

What we are seeing, though, is broad judgement passed against this entire category, and that is an error. We are seeing young people conversing, communicating, as young people do, in a medium we do not fully understand. We would not call out teenagers for sitting under a tree in the park, telling one another things they've learned about the Holocaust. Even if, as they inevitably would, they made a hash out of it, we would applaud them.

Broad condemnation of something you don't understand is always a bit dicey. I wouldn't barge in on a conversation in Italian based on having understood a handful of the words, and I certainly wouldn't tell them they were all wrong. Now, TikTok is not teenagers chatting under a tree, it's not an Italian conversation, it's not anything except TikTok. But to judge TikTok by, say, even youtube standards is no more correct.

I am by no means convinced that a blanket condemnation is the right answer here.