How TikTok is Influencing Minds and Changing Culture: A Reaction Paper

 

McGowan, L. D. (2020). How TikTok is influencing Minds and Changing Culture is an article where it shows the negative and positive impacts of the said app and how it influences the people especially the young generation. It also tackles how it started and how it provides an instant fame to the users and shows how the increasing amount of racism, oversexualization and unrealistic contents are still on the run. Tiktok started as Douyin by the company ByteDance, that enabled users to create, share and view a 15-seconds clip of different activities and began to gain traction across Asia. The article revealed the strategy of the company ByteDance on how they eliminate their competitors by buying the Musical.ly. Douyin remained available in China, then the well-known app TikTok was launched globally. It created different trends that quickly captured the attention of Gen Zs that leads to some pressure due to the number of users thinking and worrying about how they should look.

The article for me is undeniably informative, resourceful and most importantly, it spreads awareness to the young generation like me. I believe of all the algorithms it shows and how it tackles about the dark side of the app. As a user of this app, I truly observed how the generations are overly comfortable within this app. It’s somehow interesting when it comes to influencing everyone especially when it is about body positivity, different awareness and learning. Tiktok still holds its power to influence, making the minors to forgot their limitations which causes me to cringe and choose to put down my phone. The author has excellently done his job to gather and denote the different numbers that was stated in the article.

In conclusion, I would recommend McGowan’s article especially for the young generations in our time.