I am doing my Maters in Material, Visual Culture within the Anthropology Department at UCL. Like many others, I downloaded the app during the height of the pandemic, and I enjoyed watching content about cooking, lifestyle and any videos including dogs! Today, I still try to ensure my algorithm gives me lighthearted videos by often pressing ‘not interested’ on things I do not want to see.

I find the correlation between TikTok and consumption fascinating in seeing a wide variety of products ‘go viral’ through word-of-mouth recommendation. It is intriguing to better understand how specific items quickly go out of stock, or how places become known specifically through TikTok.  

I joined the collective to understand more about how TikTok works as a new ethnographic method. This is to examine how a certain sociality exists on the platform.

PS: The picture of me was taken in a TikTok trending restaurant that has over 500 million views.