Category: TikTok

Incipient Diaspora

(this was originally published as Implausipod Episode 42 on January 17th, 2025)

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/episodes/16453686-e0042-incipient-diaspora

What happens when a change is on the horizon, one that is approaching that will force you to move but is outside your control? When a community knows it will be disrupted, it may be facing an Incipient Diaspora. For the US denizens of the TikTok app, facing a ban in that country on January 19, 2025, we can observe how they reacted and prepared, and what lessons can be learned from the ongoing situation.

A famous poet once wrote that the waiting is the hardest part. Sometimes the antici-pation, can be wonderful, sometimes it can be terrible. But as we wait, that sound of inevitability, that rush of air in the distance signaling the approach of the sublime, sometimes all we can do is our best to get through the storm.

As we start 2025, we can see multiple storms on the horizon, some closer than others, and communities are handling this differently. One of the worlds we’ve been looking at is deep within cyberspace, and for the netizens of TikTok, the citizens are facing the looming dissolution of their world. Everyone is making plans on what to do next as they pass through that singularity, leaving messages about how to find one another on the other side.

We talked about this a little bit back in June of last year in TikTok Tribulations, but the trouble with tribulations is that they don’t just go away. When faced with an incipient diaspora, what do you do? Is it about the waiting or is it about the recovery? We’ll talk about both in this episode of the Implausipod.

But before we begin, a brief note. After we had started recording this episode in late December 2024, the Eaton and Pacific Palisades wildfires have devastated communities in Los Angeles, California, destroying thousands of homes and displacing many thousands more. Our hearts go out to those affected, our thanks to the firefighters and others involved in the recovery, and we urge you to contribute to a charitable organization that can assist with helping the survivors.

This episode is about loss and displacement, but it is not a commentary on the specific events of the 2025 L. A. wildfires. Thank you. 

Welcome to the Implausipod,

a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. In the last weeks of 2024, it was clear that there was a change in the air. The tone of the content made by various posters on TikTok started to change. A lot of people started making posts about other places they could make content on, or for the more casual poster, where everyone was going.

There was more than a few lurkers asking where the party was going to be, it had some real Steve Buscemi with a skateboard saying hello fellow kids energy. It was the collective realization that, absent any acts of deus ex machina, by January 19th, TikTok would go away, with legislation in the United States poised to ban the company from operating within those borders.

Of course, TikTok has a global audience, so various Brits, Australians, Canadians, and people from other countries behaved as if they were unaffected, because largely they were, but the net impact of the American audience and participants realizing that things were about to change shifted the tone of the discourse on the app as a whole.

It became a moment of incipient diaspora. As an observer, I’d like to capture a snapshot of what that moment was like as it was going on. It began shortly before Christmas 2024, as I saw people with more time on their hands, with their kids off from school, or university students home for the holidays, starting to realize that the time left with the app was short.

That there was under a month left to go. Some forward thinking people were starting to make posts asking what was going to happen in the new year. As the holiday festivities wrapped up and those who had vacations slipped into that weird, liminal, timeless zone between Christmas and New Year’s, where everyone is sleepy from gorging on turkey dinner, leftover wine and cheese, and enjoying their holiday gifts.

The trend continued, with more people starting to ask questions, and by the time New Year’s would have rolled around, everybody realized that time was drawing short. People began posting lists of links of their other social medias, other places that they could be found on. This was not unusual in and of itself, as something that happened fairly regular with content creators that derived their income from posting in various places.

Would often try to drive traffic to places that they had monetized. Or were able to capitalize off the audience. For a lot of creators, places like YouTube and Instagram were much better suited for that. So that wasn’t that noteworthy, but by January 7th, this practice had spread to the smaller creators, too.

Those who hadn’t necessarily monetized their content, but wanted to remain in contact with the friends that they had made, and the communities that they had become a part of, while on the app. In early January, this still included places that were the most wide ranging and popular, places like Facebook, Instagram, and X or Twitter.

Though the last one wasn’t quite as prominent, as there was more mentions of Blue Sky, with the migration that had already begun there following the U. S. election in November 2024. However, this was soon to change, as by the end of that week, the U. S. Supreme Court would hear arguments requesting a state of the ban.

Politically minded posters and legal scholars noticed the upcoming case and started commenting on what they thought would happen, and this spread from there to all corners of the app. with many posters expressing concern about what the outcome might be. There was an additional group of commenters who put down their epidemiologist certificates they’d been using for the last few years, dusted off their internet law degree, and stepped outside of the Motel 6 they stayed at the previous night to offer their opinions about what was going on.

But perhaps I’m being too harsh. What I’m suggesting is that a lot of people were commenting on the outcome of the case, but many of them were adding noise rather than signal to the conversation. Regardless, by the day the case of TikTok versus Merrick Garland was going to be heard, January 10th, 2025, everybody’s attention was focused on it.

The high degree of uncertainty about what the outcome of that case might be led to two notable things happening. The first was that everybody started making contingency plans, posting about other apps that they were on, places that they could be found, or profiles that they had made, and the second was that they started taking a deeper look at why the ban was taking place at all.

The argument that the app was a national security risk drew some scrutiny, and a lot of people started looking at the lobbying efforts of TikTok’s biggest competitors. Again. Meta, or Facebook. Now, Meta, the company, and the practices that it engages in and the commodification of the audience is something we’ve commented on many times on this podcast before.

We discussed the audience commodity way back in Episode 8 in July of 2023, and we touched on it a little bit more in Episode 15, entitled Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, and of course the TikTok Tribulations episode from June of last year. We’ve also commented on this in the blog and the newsletter, so let’s just say it’s an ongoing topic of discussion.

If you’d like to hear more about it, I’d encourage you to check out some of those past shows in the archives on implausopod. com. But back to the topic at hand. With TikTok users realizing that Meta and Mark Zuckerberg were one of the larger reasons that the ban was actually going forward, There was a collective pushback against moving to meta owned properties like Facebook, and Instagram especially, as they were seen as the more direct competitor to TikTok.

There was also a pushback against moving to X, as people saw Musk as equally complicit in the ban, due to his recent role with the US government. And this manifested in posters explicitly calling those platforms out and looking for direct alternatives to TikTok that weren’t owned by those companies.

This pushback was exacerbated by an announcement that Meta made on January 7th that they would no longer be using third party fact checkers, and an appearance by Mark Zuckerberg on the Joe Rogan podcast. Again, there’s a lot going on, and it’s all happening roughly contemporaneously. Following the initial arguments in front of the U.

S. Supreme Court, the users became much more active in finding alternative places. They began mobilizing, began contacting their various political representatives, and in their search for alternatives, they came up with an unlikely option. The app known as Zhenghongshu. Little Red Note, an app that was pitched as a Chinese version of TikTok, but was actually more akin to a Chinese version of Pinterest, an app that was actually Chinese state owned, operating in mainland China, and whose discourse took place largely in Mandarin.

Within two days, the TikTok userbase had collectively made this the most popular app in the App Store, and showed that they would rather learn a foreign language and deal with a directly foreign owned app than deal with a meta product again. The pettiness and spite of the American TikTok userbase apparently knows no bounds.

Much like Ricardo Montalban in Star Trek II Wrath of Khan stating, From hell’s heart, I stab at thee. For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee. The TikTok userbase were deciding to go out in epic fashion and take Meta down with them. And this brings us forward to now, January 17th, 2025, two days before the ban.

The diaspora is in full swing, and still nobody has an idea of what’s going on. It leads us to a question. Is the incipient diaspora about the waiting, or is it about the recovery?

While as of the morning of January 17th, the U. S. Supreme Court has still yet to make a statement on their decision, and both U. S. administrations, both outgoing and incoming, have somewhat punted on making a final determination, lending to much uncertainty even two days before the ban, there’s a lot that we can learn from the observations we’ve made about the reactions of the residents of TikTok.

The first observation speaks directly to that uncertainty. There’s a from the creator of the Princess Bride. Nobody knows anything. Now, William Goldman was referring to Hollywood, and that nobody can really tell when it comes to creatives pursuits, what is going to take off, what would be a hit and what wouldn’t.

But it applies in this situation as well, because January 19th is somewhat of a singularity. No one can tell for certain what’s going to happen after that point. In early to mid January, there were posters that were stating with absolute certainty and confidence about what would happen, but they had no special knowledge about what was going on.

In those times of uncertainty, the best approach is to put on one’s critical thinking hat. Because the truth is that nobody knows, and even the best can only make an informed decision based on past events and can’t say for certain what’s going to happen. However, in an era of uncertainty, there will be those courting clout and influence that seek to provide answers to a questioning audience, even where no answers exist.

In an era of uncertainty, all you can do is make backups, plan for contingencies, establish lines of communication, and try your best to ensure that you can see people on the other side. And that speaks to the second point, that there are identifiable actions that can be done. Even in an era of uncertainty.

The mantra of the three S’s, Save, Share, and Spread, goes a long way in ensuring that those challenges can be met. The first one is that you save your information. You save your peeps. You get a list of everyone you need to keep track of, everyone you need to contact, and that makes it easier to get in touch with them afterward.

You know who the real ones are, and you ensure that those are available. And this is good disaster prep in general. Have that documentation available, and have backup copies too. The second is that users need to share their info. Have that copy a list of places that they can be found and contact cards, and share that widely with the people that they want to be able to track them down.

It doesn’t have to be overly complicated, it just has to be a list of contacts on a card. For an older audience that may dimly remember the era before mobile phones, this is the list of places that people can track you down at. You know, if I’m not at the arcade, I’m at the rec center. If I’m not at the rec center, I’m at your mom’s house.

You know where to find me, right? And the third task is to spread that information. If you see a mutual acquaintance that has that contact card, you keep a copy and share it to other acquaintances so it’s more widely available. If there’s multiple copies of something around, then it’s more likely to survive and be able to be passed on.

Users are in the process of developing a network of resilience, and that’s what they need in order to manage the uncertainty that may be happening during this era. This is because the place that they’re looking to land might not even exist yet, or it might be just a app that’s in beta someplace, and not really readily available.

Users might not know where everybody’s going to be, but the idea is you create that network and you become that lighthouse that can guide the other users back to the community when you find one. And the third observation follows from that, and that is that the perfect is the enemy of the good. And when we’re talking about third spaces, both real and virtual.

virtual, sometimes it’s best to take something that exists and meets some of your needs than the perfect option that doesn’t exist or may never exist. You can’t let something not being your optimum choice deter you from using what’s available. When it comes to third spaces, both real and virtual, you need to look at what you’re trying to do.

Now, some of this builds on what Ray Oldenburg was talking about in The Great Good Place when he was originally discussing what third places are. When it comes to third spaces, you can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and the good that you’re trying to do is to build community. When you’re trying to build community, you can use the tools that are available to you.

In the late summer of 2024, there was a discussion of third places that was taking place online, both in blogs and on TikTok and other sites, and there was a lot of headcanon or misconceptions about what third places are and what counts. There are statements like a third place can’t be a business, or can’t have people working there, and if there are, then it doesn’t count, and frankly, this is nonsense.

It might not be optimal, but it can still count as a third place. Remember, a third place is just someplace that isn’t work or home, but a place where you can relax and spend some time. Some of the original examples of things like third spaces were things like barbershops or bars or coffee shops or pool halls, and these are all businesses, but they still count.

So it doesn’t matter whether it’s a McDonald’s or a Rotten Ronnie’s, or a mcds or a raunchy, Rons or a Macas. Those can all count as third spaces. You can go there every morning, grab a cup of coffee, sit around with your friends or acquaintances or people from the community or even just people passing through, and that might be the best part as you’re exposed to news from elsewhere, and you can have a discussion.

This is how community is built. It might not be perfect because it’s corporate and policy changes might change how things are going. They take out the seats or the price of coffee changes or whatever. Or this could reshape the environment and not make it as conducive to having that community and discussion.

And this can happen with the change of ownership of smaller businesses as well, whether it’s a barbershop or a pool hall or whatever. But it is something that can be used while community is being built up. This is something we talked about in our earlier episode on recursive public. So if you want to go back and check that in the archives again, I encourage you to have a look.

But this is something that we need to get over, the idea that our virtual spaces have to be perfect from the get go and not recognizing that the previous ones that we had built up over time and acquired characteristics as the users interacted with them. So again, the rule is if you find a place that’s suitable, you work to build that up and you become a lighthouse to your community and bring them in with you.

You start where you are, you use what you have, and you Do what you can. And I’m not just saying this from my own experience as someone who spent 18 months doing field work at Third Spaces looking at how communities form and interact. I mean, I am that person, but I’m not just saying that. But the point being is that a community has to be built, and it takes the effort of the individuals involved in it to come together and build and shape that community into something that works for them.

And then the fourth big takeaway from the observations is that users can make informed decisions and that their choices do matter. This became most obvious as the tide started to shift against using meta and its related products like Instagram and Facebook as An alternative to TikTok. There’s a phrase that goes around that our audience may be aware of, that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.

That in that system, someone somewhere is getting the short end of the stick. And while that’s true, there’s often an element or undercurrent of resignation, of engineered helplessness. Designed to get somebody asking, if every choice I make is wrong, if there is no ethical choice, then what does my choice matter?

But as I said earlier, that choice is critical because for users and for creators who are consumers of platforms, the choice of which platform to use really matters. On January 7th, when Meta announced that they’d no longer be using third party fact checkers, or an earlier announcement where they said that they’d be using AI agents within the stream so that your audience may no longer be an audience, one begins to wonder why even use those products at all.

A user or creator would have to ask themselves, does continuing to use this product legitimize those practices? This is a question that a number of users and creators started asking themselves when it came to X slash Twitter, and that led to the mass migration to Blue Sky as they finally realized that their presence, especially that of the journalists and academics, legitimized Twitter as a platform.

I say, finally, as it seemed like a patently obvious outcome with the change in ownership in 2022, and I’d be standing here like John McClane shouting out the window yelling, Welcome to the party, pal, but We all come to these things in our time. The point is, is once you make that realization, is you need to take action.

Long term, who’s to say that blue sky was the right choice, but right now it seems to be a safer choice, even though it might just be a big pot of honey that one day will become commodified once the resource has been sufficiently built out and another wave of migration will take place, but Such is the way of life on the internet.

The last comment we’ll make is the idea of the root causes of the ban. As we noted earlier, there was a lot of speculation about what those causes were, but most of it just boils down to two words, and those two words are market power. Market power is the ability of a firm to set the price of its good above the marginal cost.

And in this case, it’s helpful to remember what the product of a social media company is. They sell audiences to advertisers. This includes you, and me, and Everybody else and everything that’s done on those platforms, which is then packaged up and sold off to advertisers looking for those specific demographics.

In order to maintain that market power, you need to be able to manipulate either the supply or the demand. And for social media companies and other high tech firms, that works a little bit differently, because an innovation can come along and disrupt the market that they’ve gathered. For example, it doesn’t matter if you’re the best film camera company in the world, if everybody shifts to digital cameras and nobody’s taking pictures anymore.

So for firms that obtain that monopoly position that allows them to exert market power, they’ll often do a lot to retain that market power and maintain the ability to charge what they want. And I say monopoly, but it’s often usually only one or two firms within any given high tech segment. Think about Microsoft versus Apple on the desktop or.

Android versus iOS on your smartphones. Regardless of whether it’s a monopoly or a duopoly, they don’t want competition. It messes with their vibe. And their vibe is the ability to extract exorbitant profits. Now, I’m drawing this from Mordecai Kurz’s The Market Power of Technology, published in 2023.

Kurtz is a professor emeritus of economics at Stanford, and he’s been doing this for a long time. The book is pretty dense and technical, but it’s been written with an eye to a lay audience, and there’s sections of it that are very readable and include some real solutions as well. We reviewed it in a newsletter a few months back, and as I said, it was written in 2023, but what we’re seeing with the TikTok ban reads like a case study.

It’s like chapter and verse of the observations that Mordecai Kurz made in his book about market power and how it’s exerted in high tech firms. This is why something like TikTok, whose technologies presented a threat to the dominance that Meta had on its social media properties, was something that had to be dealt with from a lobbying perspective.

And I say technologies here because it’s an assemblage of technologies. It isn’t just the algorithm, which seems to draw a lot of the interest, but it’s also the app and the associated tools, the way it functions, the way it’s designed to allow users to create. All these things come together to provide a compelling alternative to met as products that are offered.

And it is in much the same way that all these observations come together to give us a picture of what happens during the incipient diaspora, the root causes as well as some of the effects that take place. As we asked earlier, when we look at an incipient diaspora, is it about the waiting or the recovery?

And in this case, What happens next?

Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Implausipod. We’re happy to start 2025 with you, and we’ve got some new episodes coming out to you soon. We’ve been preparing them for a while, so I’ve been looking forward to sharing them with you. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. You can reach me at drimplausible at implausipod.

com, and as mentioned, you can also find the show archives and all our previous shows at implausipod. com as well. I’m responsible for all elements of the show, including research, writing, mixing, mastering, and music, and the show is licensed under Creative Commons 4. 0 share alike license. No AI is used in the production of this show, though I think there’s a machine learning algorithm in the transcription software that I use.

As stated earlier, we do make allowances for accessibility. You may have also noted that there was no advertising during the program, and there’s no cost associated with the show. But it does grow from word of mouth of the community. So if you enjoy the show, please share it with a friend or two, and pass it along.

There’s also a Buy Me A Coffee link on each show at implausipod. com, which will go to any hosting costs associated with the show. Until next time, take care, and have fun.

TikTok Tribulations

(this was originally published as Implausipod E0033 on June 10th, 2024)

What happens if your community disappears? How do online groups deal with the challenges of maintaining their social ties across fickle and fleeting platforms? And are there lessons to be learned by the TikTok creators from the online MMO communities that were shut down in the early 2000s?

https://www.implausipod.com/1935232/episodes/15146242-e0033-tiktok-tribulations

[00:00:00] DrI: On the last episode of the ImplausiPod, we asked what happened if you built an app and the community was still toxic, like, whoops, what do you do next? But there’s a darker side to that question. What if you built a successful community and then it disappeared? On April 24th, 2024, the US President Joe Biden signed a foreign aid package bill that included legislation demanding that ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, divest itself of those holdings to an American owned firm or face banning in the United States. If the sale doesn’t happen within 270 days, TikTok would be prevented from appearing in app stores, as well as certain internet hosting services. Now, of course the story isn’t over, this will be contested and appealed, but for those individuals who had developed or participated in communities on TikTok, it can be a significant loss.

A loss that we’re going to look at in episode 33 of the Implausipod.

Welcome to the Implausipod, an academic podcast about the intersection of art, technology and popular culture. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. And today we’re talking about the closure of online communities. It’s rare that a thriving online community is shut down, or explicitly banned. Often what happens is that a new competing service opens up and the user base dwindles until all that is left is a shell of the former community.

Other times, the service gets sold off, changing hands, and the community gets parceled off, the data being sold, the policy changes making the community lose interest and find alternatives. The latter can be seen in services like Yahoo Groups, Tumblr, Google Groups, Google Wave, Google Plus. There might be a bit of a trend there, is what I’m saying.

Examples of services actively shutting down can be seen more often in the video game market, especially in MMOs. The glut of MMOs in the early 21st century, all built on the assumption of online play and needing an engaged community to drive the operation, led to the abandonment of that community when the service shut down, the game was canceled, or the servers were closed.

Now, in some cases, the community was strong and was able to keep things going after a fashion, but in most cases, closure of the servers meant the end of the game, and the dispersal of the members of the community. Sometimes the community knew it was coming and were able to go out with a blaze of glory, as seen on the Matrix Online or the original City of Heroes, but sometimes the community just ended.

The server’s turned off, and the light’s no longer on. And this closure, with a looming deadline, is what communities and creators on TikTok are now facing. The announcement on April 24th started a ticking clock, a 270 day countdown timer with a date for divestment of the app by its parent company. And, in late April and early May following the announcement, a number of creators on the app, some recognizable figures, some longtime lurkers, first time posters, made heartfelt appeals.

To the communities that they built or discovered during their time on TikTok. I’d like to share a couple of those with you right now. They’re short because, well, it is TikTok after all, but if there is a video version of this podcast, I’ll try my best to splice them in. The first is by a creator by the name of Vegas Starfish, an events planner in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA.

At the time of recording of this episode, Her post had received a quarter of a million views, garnering 40, 000 likes and several thousand comments. Here’s her post, in her own words. 

[00:03:39] Vegas: This is my farewell to TikTok. As you know, TikTok was just banned in the United States. This app changed my life. This is me before TikTok, and this is me after.

I was a miserable, mid level casino executive. I started making content about my city and how much I loved it, and then I started living life. I have never made this platform about me. It was always about the city, but I want to show you a glimpse at the creator behind the videos. I’ve always been socially awkward.

And it was through this app that I was able to meet other creators and most importantly, meet so many of you, every single one of you changed my life. Suddenly my voice mattered and I had a purpose and I started living boldly. I began traveling all over the world. As my self worth and self confidence grew, I became a better parent, a better friend, and I’ve never been great at making friends, but the best ones I’ve ever had came through this app.

I’ve had the opportunity to work with incredible artists and creators, people that I would have never had access to otherwise, and together by creating dynamic content, we’ve been able to change the paths for thousands of small businesses by directly highlighting great people doing great things. We’ve done so much good.

I know that the loss of this app will hurt creators and businesses financially, but I’m afraid of losing the human connection. We’ve been able to take you along for amazing resorts opening and iconic ones closing. Together we were among the first to discover a massive corporate hack last fall. You were with me when the sphere opened and we saw F1 cars race down the Las Vegas Strip together.

I have shared thousands of moments with millions of people. It has fundamentally changed my life and the lives of so many others. I am eternally grateful for every experience and every interaction. It has been a whirlwind. And I appreciate you more than you know. I hope to see some of you on IG. And thank you for following me for all the Vegas.

A special shout out to the feral cat from the Rio who helped me go viral in the beginning. You’re the real MVP. 

[00:05:40] DrI: Here we can see how a person was able to change their career, find and build a community, and increase their personal happiness by becoming more engaged with the job they were doing. sharing that and then reaching out and taking a more active role within the community to the extent that they experienced better mental and physical health and career growth and wellbeing.

Pretty awesome all around. And while her story was specific to TikTok, there are similar stories like hers on many other platforms. During the same week that Vegas starfish posted, there was another post that was made that also. went somewhat viral, and it went into the benefits of TikTok for that person.

This was a first time post by a long time lurker, who felt compelled to reach out to her community for the first time because of the impending ban. I’ll play a portion of that post here, as the full post is over four and a half minutes long. 

[00:06:36] Katy: Hi, my name’s Katie. And I’ve never posted on TikTok before, and I probably never will again, but I was watching the live vote today on TikTok, um, for Congress to ban it.

And I just started really reflecting on the past four years that I’ve been watching TikTok. I’ve been just a lurker. I don’t post. I just watch. Um, but it’s meant a lot to me and I wanted to maybe record my first and only video as a thank you. It’s going to be pretty rough because I had to look up how to do all of this.

So I apologize for that. I found TikTok in 2020 during COVID when my children with disabilities came home from school and instead of just mother, I was mother and teacher. And it was overwhelming. And I lived in a pretty homogenous suburban neighborhood where there was very much one way to be. And. I had a mental breakdown.

I know I’m not the only one and I was prescribed more antidepressants or maybe a stay in a treatment facility for an eating disorder. But instead, the thing that really helped me was discovering TikTok and all of you. I Learned a new parenting language toward my children that was very different from the one that I was taught from Mama Cusses.

Um, I was diagnosed with ADHD, as were we all, and I learned how to manage it and do struggle care, closing duties, and reset to functional with Casey Davis. Um, I learned how to normalize being normal from Emily Jean, I, um, watched TV shows and movies and pieces that I never would have watched before because of ADHD and anxiety comfort.

Always like watching the same thing. I learned that it’s. Um, normal and okay to cosplay, to, um, treat your fandoms like old friends, to like to read spicy fiction. Um, I learned more about my neurodivergent or neurospicy children in the last four years on TikTok than I did online. Almost all of the earlier childhood.

[00:08:49] DrI: And from there, Katie goes on to thank some of the specific creators that she followed and whose content she enjoyed. And we can see within her posts some of the challenges that she was facing, both as a mother and a teacher, dealing with a mental breakdown and parenting children with special needs, learning concepts like struggle care and normalize, and being exposed to new media, new hobbies, new fandoms, basically learning in all of these instances.

And in her post, we can see how much community contributed to that. And this is the power of community to the audience. Now, sometimes they’re derogatorily referred to as lurkers and the level of involvement and investment that they perceive to have of themselves with relation to the community. These can often be referred to as

parasocial relationships, and this can be true. Parasocial relationships are one sided relationships where someone develops a sense of connection or familiarity with someone they don’t know, like a celebrity or a media figure. With the rise of social media, creating more media figures than ever before, People have observed the rise of these relationships, but the term has been around since the 1950s when Horton and Wohl observed it in television audiences.

These relationships may look fake to the outside observer, but we can also see the power that these invisible social ties have. This is the demonstration of a well known phenomenon in the social sciences. In 1973, Mark Granovetter wrote a famous paper called The Strength of Weak Ties. You might not have heard of the paper, but judging by the nearly 40, 000 times it’s been cited, perhaps what was in the paper has been filtered out to become common knowledge.

In this paper, Granovetter was looking at job hunting specifically, and how people use their connections when searching for a job. And found that it was the secondary social ties, not your best friends, but your more casual acquaintances, that were more likely to come through in something like a job search.

Because your best friends, your strong ties, are more likely to run in similar social circles. They would be aware of similar opportunities. But those more Distant ties allow for further reach, and can be helpful as one looking for a career change, for example. We can see the effects of both of these in the posts I included above.

Both creators spoke of new connections they made, the knowledge they gained, and how they both Benefited from those social connections. There was another benefit that both creators had as well, though it isn’t as obvious. In the second post, Katie’s post, we can see how easy it was for a first time creator to reach out and make a post that was able to reach a million.

This has been one of the strengths of TikTok as a platform. As a tool, it democratized content production, turning users into Creators able to produce fully edited videos along with effects, captions, and connected to other content at the push of a button. And I cannot stress this enough, comparing something like TikTok to what needs to be done to produce this podcast or YouTube video, for instance, is night and day.

As the saying goes, the purpose of a system is what it does. A well known systems theory quote from Stafford Beer. And this is what TikTok succeeds at more than most. It isn’t just the algorithmic content delivery and sorting mechanisms that go on behind the scenes, but also turning more and more people into content creators.

To this end, TikTok democratizes the opportunity to create. It removes gatekeepers from the products and allows users to make the materials that they want to see. Often, when we talk about democratization, we’re talking about material things, but here we’re seeing it with informational objects as well.

People can create exactly what they want to see and then share it with everybody and perhaps find an audience for those kinds of things, whether they knew one existed or not. And as Eric von Hippel points out in his 2005 book on innovation, it’s more than just the products quote, it’s the joy and the learning associated with creativity and membership in creative communities that are also important.

These experiences too are made more widely available as innovation is democratized. End quote. And I really want to stress this because this is what pretty much every article that I’ve seen on TikTok misses the fact on. Everybody points towards the algorithm or the social network and those elements of it, but the true secret sauce of TikTok is the ease of use of the content creation tools.

It can literally, with the push of a button, turn anybody and everybody into a television producer. Or director, or actor, or creative of some form. If TikTok is the new television, which I argued four years ago or so now, then everybody who posts on TikTok is a TV content creator of some kind. And I’m gonna let that sit for a second.

To expand further on that idea of democratization, I’m gonna return to Eric Von Hippel and quote at length. User firms, and increasingly even individual hobbyists, have access to sophisticated design tools for fields ranging from software to electronics to musical composition. All these information based tools can be run on a personal computer and are rapidly coming down in price.

With relatively little training and practice, they enable users to design new products and services, and music and art. At a satisfyingly sophisticated level, then if what has been created is an information product, such as software or music, the design is the actual product, software you can use or music you can play, end quote.

Now that was published in 2005, so we’re seeing him capture in writing the effects of both the dot com revolution and the wide scale rollout of new computing in advance of the Y2K issue. That saw a massive expanse in computing products as everybody was purchasing new machines that were Y2K compatible.

But let’s go back to Von Hippel’s quote there. So, individual hobbyists having access to sophisticated design tools. Check. Allowing musical composition, video editing, all at the touch of a button. Absolutely. That’s what TikTok does. They could run on a personal computer at the time or now just the phone that is pretty much readily available to everybody.

Check. Rapidly coming down in price. Check. Basically free with an app or several apps in some cases with relatively little training and practice. Yes, new products and services and music and art all these things and we see some of this with AI tools Even though that’s not what we’re talking about right now and at a satisfyingly sophisticated level Good enough to show on the internet and a lot of people are obviously engaged with it and then software you can use music You can play Yes, the design is the product.

The thing that gets put out, gets shared with everybody, and that is the thing. And, as he said in the previous quote, this builds and allows access to creative communities, which ties directly to the quotes from the two TikTok users that we saw. There’s also another side effect of this democratization of content, and that is the increasing media literacy.

If we posit that literacy is not just being an informed reader, but also allows one the ability to write, so both input and output, upstream and downstream, then being more aware of content production The difference between what gets recorded, what gets seen, and how the audience reacts makes everybody involved more media literate.

Or at least it would if they’re paying attention. And I think to a large degree people are becoming more aware. However, more than just examples of democratizing content production and enhancing media literacy, Both posts from the users that I shared are evidence of the positive benefits of community.

We’ve referred to Howard Rheingold’s work on the virtual community earlier, and he quotes at length from M. Scott Peck’s Different Drum at the start of his book, and Scott writes, quote, We know the rules of community. We know the healing effect of community in terms of individual lives. If we could somehow find a way across the bridge of our knowledge, would not these same rules have a healing effect upon our world?

We human beings have often been referred to as social animals, but we are not yet community creatures. We are impelled to relate with each other for our survival, but we do not yet relate with the inclusivity, realism, self awareness, vulnerability, commitment, openness, freedom, equality, and love of genuine community.

It is clearly no longer enough to be simply social animals babbling together at cocktail parties and brawling with each other in business and over boundaries. It is our task, our essential, central, crucial task, to transform ourselves from mere social creatures into community creatures. It is the only way that human evolution will be able to proceed.

It’s a rather lengthy list that Scott has there in the middle of that quote. Inclusivity, realism, self awareness, vulnerability, commitment, openness, freedom, equality, and love of genuine community. But, I think it’s an essential one. When we think of the world around us, those are all things that we could use a little bit more of.

And as sociologist Richard Sennett notes in his book, Together, this community can be vocational as well. That working towards building the community can have such significant effects that it’s beneficial to all those involved, even the bystanders. As we saw with The Lurker in our second quote, that the audience gains benefits from the community as well.

The communities described by both creators are both meaningful. real despite being online. As we mentioned last episode, and probably often, is that there is no difference between online and offline communities save for the annihilation of distance and time. The distinctions made between cyberspace and quote meat space is often a false dichotomy.

Within academic writing on online communities, social networks, and the like, This difference was sometimes highlighted early in the literature, though more recent critical or reflective writing may no longer make that distinction. And that happens because in the 30 years or so since the publication of Rheingold’s Virtual Community, we have some Fantastic real world examples of what happens in online communities, especially when they go away.

And the reason there are so many online communities that went away is that in the early 2000s, having an online community was part of the business model of a number of companies. Including companies that were developing online games. And specifically those developing MMOs. The wave of massively multiplayer online roleplaying games that relied on a monthly subscription model.

This largely paralleled the shift to Web 2. 0 that was occurring at that time. around 1999 to 2004. But as we’ve been seeing with a lot of things gaming related during the course of this podcast, the gaming community somewhat preceded it, acting as a harbinger of things to come. Web 2. 0 is of course the change in the web from static web pages to user generated content, or UGC.

The MMO boom started in 1997 with the release of Ultima Online. where the term was coined, but it really took off beginning in 1999 with the release of EverQuest, and then heading straight to the moon with the release of World of Warcraft in 2004, and not 2001’s Shadows of Luclin expansion as maybe three people listening to this podcast might have been guessing.

Within the window of the MMO boom, numerous MMOs were launched based on a wide variety of intellectual property. Some licensed, some original, and all developed a community of some fashion around them. Even though the subscription based model that most used during this initial period represented a kind of Software as a Service, or SAAS, They were really more like community in a box.

The games relied on the volunteer labor provided by the community in terms of guides, maps, strategies, and communication hubs, external to the games themselves. In many cases, the games would be extremely difficult without the shared knowledge bases that the communities provided. It was the epitome of participatory culture that we discussed back in episode 16 on Spreadable Media.

And the communities. built around these games in part on the shared labour and collective action that was put into their creation. MMOs lived and died by the communities that existed around them. Alas, in a very dense and competitive marketplace, not every MMO succeeded, even if the community was there.

So I’d like to take a look at three that had high aspirations but ended up shutting down. These three were Sony Online Entertainment’s Star Wars Galaxies, released in 2003, Cryptic Studios slash NCSoft’s City of Heroes, launched in 2004, and Monolith Productions 2005 release of The Matrix Online. Each of these were big budget MMOs with a large fanbase.

Some due to the tie ins with existing popular media licenses, and in City of Heroes case, being a generic superhero simulator in the era prior to the rise of the MCU wasn’t a bad thing. It emphasized team play, with groups of heroes working together to complete missions and fight larger threats, emulating the fiction of the superhero comics in general.

Star Wars Galaxies was developed by Sony Online, with a rich user driven in game economy developed by Raph Koster, one of the more notable MMO designers from his work on Ultima Online, who pushed for a simulationist view, where players would be crafting all the gear and materials used in the game. At least, initially.

And the Matrix Online provided a rich narrative experience, providing what is called transmedia storytelling, as the events taking place in the game are part of the larger continuity of stories told about the Matrix, coexisting with the events of the movies and other properties like the Animatrix. Each of these games managed to develop a dedicated community of players, active participants in engaging and extending the world.

But despite this active community, each of these properties failed, and the MMOs were closed. For The Matrix Online, it was shut down in 2009 due to low player numbers, as competition was tough, and honestly, the 2008 crash saw a number of properties struggle with their business model. For Star Wars Galaxies, when it closed in 2011, it was stated it was due to the loss of the license for Star Wars gaming, 

which is a risk for any media property as well. For City of Heroes, without the licensing issues of the other two, it was a change in the focus of the publisher as the stated reason for its closure in 2012. At least, for a little while. The interesting thing is how these communities reacted to the closing of the servers, of knowing that the community that they had lovingly built was was going to disappear at a specified point in the future.

Each of the games had a massive farewell event, with the community coming online to celebrate the last moments. The Matrix Online turned it into a story event, and you can check out the link to the videos of that storyline in the show notes. The fans of Star Wars Galaxies created a similar event, and I’ll link that one too, culminating in a massive battle between the Empire and the Rebel Alliance that was live streamed on the internet.

City of Heroes had a number of player run events leading up to the servers being shut down. When they went dark, all three Of these MMOs saw their communities dispersed, a virtual diaspora drifting out to other online places and virtual spaces.

But for both Star Wars Galaxies and City of Heroes, the game lived on. Fans of each game had started private servers using emulation software, allowing the members of the community to meet up again and play the game, after a fashion, much the same as they had before. Not every member of the old community signed up for the emulator servers, of course, and they did skirt the bounds of legality, but it allowed the games to continue.

It allowed the community to continue. And for City of Heroes, the under the radar private server launched in 2019 became an officially licensed private server in 2024, free to play but funded via donations for server costs and the like. The online community was able to rebuild and bring it back to an audience 12 years after it closed, at least officially.

SInce the private server relaunched in 2019, the devs working on the game have added new material, new missions, and new features, showing that an active community can still support a game enough to allow future development. The gaming community may be showing the TikTok community a path forward if the proposed legislation goes through in the United States.

While there are current alternatives to the short form video that TikTok popularized, like Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, Clapper, and others, each of those have appealed to a different community and haven’t seen the wholesale move of the TikTok user base. It may happen, as often users will move to a site or page or app or whatever that they find most appealing, but this isn’t always the case.

There may be an opportunity for users to build their own. Tools like loops. video, which is currently in alpha testing at the time of this show’s publication, allow a very similar short video format. built on the ActivityPub protocol that we’ve discussed last episode and several times before. And much like Meta’s threads was built in record time to capture disaffected Twitter users, we may see other options spring up if TikTok is truly banned in the United States.

We’ll keep an eye on this story as it develops, and come back to it in a few months to see what the results are, and where the community goes.

Once again, thank you for joining us on the Implausipod. I’m your host, Dr. Implausible. You can reach me at drimplausible at implausipod. com, and you can also find the show archives and transcripts of all our previous shows at implausipod. com as well. I’m responsible for all elements of the show, including research, writing, mixing, mastering, and music, and the show is licensed under Creative Commons 4. 0 share alike license. No AI tools were used in the production of this podcast, save for the transcription software, which I believe is just machine learning. You may have noticed at the beginning of the show that we described the show as an academic podcast, and you should be able to find us on the Academic Podcast Network when that gets updated.

You may have also noted that there was no advertising during the program, and there’s no cost associated with the show, but it does grow through the word of mouth of the community. So if you enjoy the show, please share it with a friend or two and pass it along. There’s also a, buy me a coffee link on each show at applausopod.

com, which would go to any hosting costs associated with the show. Over on the blog, we’ve started up a monthly newsletter. There will likely be some overlap with future podcast episodes and newsletter subscribers can get a hint of what’s to come ahead of time. So consider signing up and I’ll leave a link in the show notes.

Coming soon on the ImplazaPod, we already have some episodes in the pipeline, though I’m not quite sure of their release order yet. We have a two part discussion on the first season of the Fallout TV series, as well as a recap of the most recent season of Doctor Who. And we’ll be looking at a few other online activities, including the emergence of the dial up pastoral and the commodification of curation.

I hope you join us for them, they’re going to be fantastic. Until then, take care, and have fun.

Bibliography:

Bartle, R. (2003). Designing Virtual Worlds. New Riders Press.

Granovetter, M. (1973). The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360–1380.

Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. NYU Press.

Koster, R. (2004). A theory of fun for game design. Paraglyph Press.

Rheingold, H. (2000). The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the electronic frontier. MIT Press.

Sennett, R. (2012). Together: The rituals, pleasures and politics of cooperation. Yale University Press.

The Matrix Online Videos—Giant Bomb. (2012, July 12). https://web.archive.org/web/20120712062536/http://www.giantbomb.com/the-matrix-online/61-9124/videos/

There Is Another: The End Of Star Wars Galaxies – Part 01 – Giant Bomb. (2012, January 7). https://web.archive.org/web/20120107150559/http://www.giantbomb.com/there-is-another-the-end-of-star-wars-galaxies-part-01/17-5439/

von Hippel, E. (2005). Democratizing Innovation. The MIT Press.

Links:

City of Heroes: Homecoming

Implausipod Episode 16 – Spreadable Media

The Implausi.blog Newsletter

No longer a geek?

“Can I interest you in everything all of the time” – Bo Burnham, Welcome to the Internet

At what point do you realize that you’re no longer part of a culture? That you’ve aged out, that the culture has shifted beyond you, that the things you once thought were cool are seen as cheugy? And, if you being part of this culture is central to your identity, to your self-perception, what do you do? How do you react?

What do you do when you realize you’re no longer a nerd?

We’ll get back to that in a moment. The question was shared with me on TikTok by @midnightlibrarian, who posts some really great M:tG content. Feeling like nerd culture now, focused on video games, cosplay, MCU, and the like may no longer have a place for the elements of nerd culture that he partakes in. That the ground may have shifted beneath their feet. That, even though they still self-identify as a nerd, that identity is called into question, as they don’t identify with the aspect of nerd-dom that is now dominant in the hierarchy. It can be unsettling, this feeling of being unhomed, of the the doubt and instability that this feeling brings with it. How do you deal with it?

There’s no one true way to deal with it, but some work better than others. One of the ways that emphatically doesn’t is one we reach to instinctively. Standing your ground, and defiantly resisting the entrance of newcomers to your corner of the nerd culture happens time and time again. It’s a large component in a lot of the online “toxicity” that happens throughout nerd-dom. And it works so well: just ask the model railroaders and OG wargamers how well leaning in to grognardia worked out. If you can find them.

(Yes, it’s the internet, I’m aware you can still find them.)

I’m hard pressed to think of examples of nerd-dom that have successfully resisted the changing tides. And, as noted, the defense mechanisms that get deployed in these Bourdieu-sian wars over social capital are incredibly toxic. (But more on this later: a working paper of mine on toxic gamer cultures was recently accepted to a conference, and I’ll publish more on that as it gets closer to publication). In the meantime, perhaps a Simpson’s meme sums this position up best:

Of course, if you want to resist without contributing to the (overt) toxicity, you have other options available to you. I call it the “smile and wave” approach. (It works better if you’re humming along to The Headstones tune of the same name while you do it). It’s a recognition that cultural change is constant, and that trying to capture the vagaries of youth culture is like reaching for a sunbeam with a butterfly net: amorphous and ephemeral, and constantly just out of reach. For most of us, this can be fleeting: we may happen to be down with whatever is cool for the moment, but in an instant it’ll pass us by. It’s okay though, it’ll happen to the next generation too:

Going down this road can still be toxic, depending on delivery, as it may arrive with an air of condescension and dismissiveness. It can be bundled with elitism, nostalgia, and smugness, and we’ve recently seen what lies down the road of nostalgia. But delivery is everything, and it can be server up with a slice of wry too.

And this leads us to our third path: just let it go. (No need for a Frozen take here, you can write your own.) This can be the hardest path, to put it down and walk away. It can be difficult to push aside something that you’ve drawn in and made part of your identity. It can involved some self-awareness and self-reflection, and honestly who has time for that in the midst of the dumpster fire that has been the Twenty-twenties so far. Realizing that others’ enjoyment of things within your culture in no way impacts your experience or enjoyment is hard, because it feels like it does, especially in the moment. If you’ve spent your childhood and teens feeling ostracized, and finding solace and friendship within a little corner of nerd culture where you’ve been left undisturbed, it can be traumatic when it opens up to the mainstream and all of a sudden everyone is there with you. (More on this later, in the above mentioned article). It can be hard, really hard, to let it go.

Ultimately, something as vast and amorphous as nerd-dom is no one thing. The shifting tides of interest and attention will lift some boats and sink others. And as nerd culture has become more prevalent in the 21st century – as nerd culture has become pop culture, with the rise of the MCU, videogaming, et al. – those tides are larger and moving swifter than before. And that’s okay.

Being a part of nerd culture does not mean you need to be down with all of nerd culture. One of the (many) ways that a show like The Big Bang Theory misrepresented nerd-dom was the ease and facility that the gang were suddenly into everything nerdy, from week to week. Grad students and post-docs! Please! Hence the Bo Burnham quote in the epigraph: the internet will present you everything you might be interested in with click or two, and the algorithmic engines of Google, Facebook, and TikTok will show you anything tangentially related to it in the service of advertising, but there’s no need to dive into it all. You’ll be overwhelmed; the tides are too strong.

But that doesn’t mean you need to let it go either, to let that identity pass you by. You can maintain your position within nerd-dom, maintain your geek cred, and let it thrive within you. You may look at what “the kids these days” are interested in, and see if you can share what they love about it too. Or you may decide to put it away and move on to find a new element of interest, move to a new stage or new field, with new areas of excitement on the horizon. The paths are open, the choice is yours.