What if certain social networks led to the creation of “nations”?
Posted at 7:23 p.m.
Announced and feared for some time, the cessation of service of the Chinese application TikTok in the United States ultimately only lasted a few hours. While the social network is considered a threat to American national security, some decision-makers also consider the platform to be an ideological danger, in that it would fuel pro-Palestinian sentiment and undermine American support for Israel’s crimes. Currently, the app is functional again in the United States, after Donald Trump assured that he wanted to suspend the law banning it, a law of which he was the instigator. One wonders if this momentary resurrection constitutes a public relations exercise to make the incoming president a savior in the eyes of the 170 million Americans who use the app.
I was on the platform when it “died” in the United States. The spectacle playing on my screen made me feel like I was attending a real funeral. Some TikTokers reviewed their best TikTok moments, as if they were seeing their lives flash before their eyes, while others broadcast live “agony streams” in a dramatic atmosphere, with a sad piano background. A new trend has even pushed many creators to confess their most embarrassing secrets, echoing the detachment or letting go that sometimes accompanies impending death. Yolo.
If this collective mourning had everything to do with the loss of the platform, it also reflected the loss of a community. Because it’s not just a tool that American TikTokers were crying about that evening; they also missed a culture, a shared history, even a part of their identity. What this transitional mourning has thus revealed is the existence of what we could call “platform nationalism”.
Identity construction
In its modern meaning, the idea of “nation” refers to a people who see themselves as part of a community sharing distinct characteristics such as a language, values, territory, and history. But can we really talk about “nation” when we talk about TikTok? If the network contains subcultures, like Quebectok, for example, it also seems to shelter an overall culture which is structured around shared memetic expressions and references, even a particular gastronomy, a whole songs, dances and a story all its own.
To fully understand this culture, you need to know that the architecture of TikTok gives precedence to a personalized algorithmic feed, that of the For You Page. This seemingly endless feed suggests content to users based on their assumed tastes and interests. The more time we spend on TikTok, the more precise the recommendations the algorithm makes to us seem, as if tailor-made for us. “When you scroll on your For You Pagewe have the impression that the TikTok algorithm us knows », says Rachel Karten, web culture columnist behind the newsletter Link in Bio. This For You Page can even seem to be the expression of a “deeper self”, in that it sometimes seems to reveal us to ourselves. Considered by many as the fruit of a personal investment, an algorithmic co-creation, this page ends up participating in our identity construction.
Evolving within this structuring architecture, TikTok users share unique values.
-For example, since the application arouses the distrust of many Western governments, we can say that the latter inhabit a vaguely non-conformist posture and demonstrate a form of political distrust. Some even take pride in it, in that the Chinese application is one of the only social networks to compete with American web giants. This pride also became palpable on the night of January 18 to 19, when thousands of American TikTokers chose to flee to another Chinese application, RedNoteas if to reaffirm what distinguished them in their eyes from other Internet users: a desire to defy the supremacy of a handful of American giants.
In 1983, historian Benedict Anderson published Imagined Communitiesa seminal work in which he examines the emergence of modern nationalism, which he links to the emergence of merchant capitalism and the invention of the printing press. For Anderson, it is among other things the media, particularly the written press, which has given rise to what he calls “imagined communities”. While reading The Pressfor example, we imagine ourselves as part of a community of readers similar to us. Thus, the media play a role that goes far beyond the dissemination of information: they influence the way we see ourselves as a people.
However, at a time when social media are taking up more and more space in our lives, they are no longer limited to participating in the creation of imagined communities, they have also become the territories on which these nations take root. – for-profit countries governed by totalitarian powers.
What the ephemeral disappearance of TikTok in the United States reveals above all is the danger of forging one’s identity, one’s business or one’s community on a precarious platform that could disappear at any moment.
According to Jason Koebler, technology journalist at 404 Media, the solution would be to create decentralized and federated social media that would allow their users to maintain their identity, their data and their subscribers independent of the dealings of a minority of billionaires1. To get there, however, there would still be a lot of work to do.
1. Lisez l’article « Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative to the Tech Oligarchy » (en anglais)
