A Critical Forum on Media and Culture
A Critical Forum on Media and Culture
Michael Z. Newman explores the convergence of television and TikTok, arguing that platforms like TikTok embody television’s fragmentary logic and attention-driven economy, transforming late-night shows like After Midnight into viral, internet-native content.
Read moreJuan Llamas-Rodriguez explores how subway flood videos transform extreme weather from spectacle into genre. As infrastructure crumbles under climate-induced disasters, viewers shift between individual frustration and collective crisis awareness. These videos blend intimate, smartphone-captured perspectives with a wider, omniscient view of urban vulnerability, bridging personal experience with public crisis. In doing so, they force audiences to confront their roles in a destabilising climate.
Read moreTrevor Boffone examines the use of TikTok by musical theatre fans to illustrate the digital afterlives of popular Broadway shows.
Read moreTrevor Boffone recounts a harrowing experience traveling back from Japan with a cohort of high school students. Dr. Boffone became a viral news story through the storytelling affordances of TikTok. He reflects upon these affordances, positioning the platform as a site of agency and self-determination.
Read moreNina Linhales Barker discusses the complications of Latina fans wanting to see themselves represented in Netflix’s Bridgerton.
Read moreMoa Eriksson Krutrök explores the ways social media like TikTok can offer individuals social support to process grief and trauma. Unfortunately, meme culture can radically recontextualize the personal and exploit already vulnerable people.
Read moreDrawing on examples such as NPR’s Tiny Desk (Home) Concert and Instagram’s Verzuz battles, Alyx Vesey explores how musicians have utilized online platforms as alternatives to live concerts in the age of COVID-19.
Read moreThe cottagecore trend is finding new expression on Tiktok as users present highly curated visions of domesticity. Caroline N. Bayne explores the myths in cottagecore aesthetics and the ways in which they present the home as a sacred space untroubled by the world of work.
Read moreThough TikTok’s algorithm appears to be highly personalized by your taste, the company’s algorithm may not have this in mind. Andrea Ruehlicke investigates issues of agency and implications of presuming the personal is self-determined.
Read moreLooking at artists like Lil Nas X, Abigail Barlow, and Absofacto, Meghan Grosse explores how viral success on TikTok is affecting the mainstream music industry.
Read moreUsing the Chicago Bull’s Mascot, Benny the Bull, as a case study, James Bingaman considers how TikTok is used in NBA branding to create parasocial bonds with fans.
Read moreLuis Loya and Elaine Almeida utilize Communication Theory of Identity (CTI) to understand how hashtags and duet/remix affordances connect the multiplicity of queer identity performances across TikTok.
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