By King Lars
Art by Abdo Hassan
As kids, we all used to sing and dance in front of the mirror, maybe even holding a hairbrush as a makeshift microphone, as we lived our imagined rockstar daydreams. Unfortunately for the youth of today, we have social media apps to showcase every aspect of our lives — even the most embarrassing moments
The newest trend in the social media sphere that has rocketed to prominence is the music video app Tik Tok.
We’ve all seen the videos on our social media feeds. Young people lip-syncing the same clip from that one Beyonce song, acting out a scene from a movie, or just ranting about the problems of naive youth — like being grounded by their mom or getting a bad grade on a homework assignment.
As an aging millennial, you may ask yourself — should I jump on this trend?
The answer is: probably not.
Tik Tok, formally known as the karaoke app Musical.ly, was created by the Chinese company ByteDance. It has quickly risen to be the world’s fastest-growing app of 2020, with more than 104.7 million installs in January alone.
The app has essentially become a reincarnation of Vine — but with added surveillance from the Chinese Communist Party.
National security risks aside, the general audience for Tik Tok is targeted at the younger portion of Gen Z, namely middle schoolers and high school freshmen. Despite this, those over the age of 25 make up nearly one-quarter of Tik Tok users internationally.
However, even the older segment of Gen Z feels left out from the Tik Tok revolution.
The phrase ‘Too young for Facebook, too old for Tik Tok’ has started circulating the internet, a dilemma faced by older zoomers who were born in the late ‘90s and early 2000s.
The age requirement to use the app is set at just 13. Despite this, much younger users are still on the app, skewing the average median age to be much younger.
A majority of older Tik Tok users aren’t content creators on the platform; just lurkers taking in the zany energy of the zoomers, inter-generational vampires that have nothing better to do with their lives.
In fact, an anonymous 12-year-old Tik Tok user who saw a 30-year-old Tik Tok user commented: “I thought, ‘She’s too old to be on TikTok. Please go!'”
The people have spoken. Stop weirding out the Tik Tok kids.
I know. You still feel young. You still think you’re hip. But, it’s time to face the facts. You’re not the young trendsetter anymore. You’re pushing 30 or 40. Your beer gut is bigger, a lot of your friends are sober now, and you like to talk about the good old days.
Leave the new social media platforms to the kids and make the best with the ones you have. One day, you’ll all be assigned to an internet retirement home where you can shitpost and share memes to your heart’s content.
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