I'll admit on the onset: Tik Tok can be a bit hard to understand if you haven't used it. And I haven't. However, I know people who do and I know some of the popular trends, songs, dances, etc. that appear on the platform. It's these trends that, I think, showcase some very interesting social practices. Coming from work done by Jenkins, Ford, and Green, I think that Tik Tok showcases their four categories (emergent, dominant, residual, and archaic) exceptionally well.
The emergent is that which is brand new; practically adopted and not yet mainstream. Think of the latest smartphone, a newly emerging music artist, etc. Dominant shows what's popular in the moment with the general public. Very popular movies, video games, memes, and media platforms fall into this. Residual are ideas and trends that used to be dominant, but have lingered into the modern day. Vinyl, minecraft, and old music (typically 50's-90's; Elvis, The Beatles, Queen, Michael Jackson, etc.) showcase this well. Archaic are the things that have basically been forgotten to the sands of time.
Tik Tok has an interesting relationship with these concepts, and I'd argue it uses all four simultaneously.
Here's rapper Roddy Ricch. His song "The Box" may feel a little old now, but it's a perfect demonstration of the "emergent," and how the "emergent" moves into the "dominant." The song is pretty good if you enjoy rap, but it spread like wildfire across Tik Tok around a month ago. It wasn't that popular before then, so it was basically adopted by these users.
This was basically a brand new song that the platform adopted; bringing it into the emergent phase. It may not have been mainstream, but like the newest piece of technology there were early adopters who started to bring attention to it. The song was not mainstream, was new, and got adopted into an emergent popular culture. Similar things happened to the song Dance Monkey.
Both of these songs skyrocketed in the chart soon after they were emerging on Tik Tok, moving them into the dominant culture.
Speaking of dominant culture, let's look at Lewis Capaldi's "Someone you Loved." I don't know the full timeline, but I believe that the song had gotten mainstream attention before it arrived on Tik Tok. Users started doing covers, using it in memes, lip-syncing to it, and acting using it as a backing track.
The song was in dominant culture; popular, mainstream, viral, all the buzzwords. Point is it was everywhere and it was popular. And Tik Tok was part of it being in the mainstream. It adopted the song and made the most of it.
Residual is where things begin to get a bit more interesting. Tik Tok has a strange affinity for old fashion. Take this image of a girl in time period clothing under "#VintageGirls", or this video of a guy adopting fashionable clothing from older eras. This sort of "time period" content is quite common on the platform, and almost always adopts recognizable, residual fashion/music aspects.
The people using the platform know these sorts of residual aspects of society, and choose to adopt them. Users like it, and they use it in their content. The residual is somewhat adopted back into the culture of Tik Tok; still not making it into dominant or even emergent culture, but always lingering around.
Archaic culture shows up in two common ways on the platform: use of dead memes/trends, and resurrecting previously forgotten aspects of culture.
The first part of this is fairly straightforward. A trend or meme has dies on the platform, and it gets forgotten. It may be used again by someone who's out of touch (or just really likes the meme,) but it's already exited the public consciousness with no universal remembrance.
Resurrecting the dead is more interesting though. Tik Tok not only has an affinity for making emergent songs popular, but for bringing back old ones. Take the song "You Make My Dreams Come True" by Hall and Oates. Now it may be a little debatable on whether the song is archaic or residual, but hear me out. The song came out in 1980, and most of the people using Tik Tok aren't old enough to have seen the residual or dominant phases of this song. They only know it as a song from Tik Tok (a lot of them think it's a hot, new song.) For them, this is archaic. Yet they brought it back.
I think that Tik Tok is a very good showcase for understanding social media's in terms of phases of culture/trends. Not only does it have it's own subcultures we can analyze, but it also interacts with our own culture and uses the trends from it. This information allows us to compare the usage in the dominant culture and Tik Tok, and see how they reflect and interact. Using Tik Tok, we can see in real time using real trends/topics how popularity, use, and life cycles work on social media.
If you want to research internet trends and how they interact with culture, look no further than Tik Tok.
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