What have you been up to during the coronavirus pandemic? The media has certainly played plenty of attention to the growth in popularity of apps such as TikTok as a celebration of girlhood and the transformation of girls’ ‘bedroom culture’. It is marketed as something innocent, to fill time and be creative. Maybe you or your friends have been involved at some stage?
Younger girls post videos online to TikTok, often just a few seconds in length. They typically feature their creators (and sometimes friends or family members) dancing and lip-synching to hip hop music, direct to camera and usually filmed in a bedroom on a smartphone. It looks great fun and the app has been described as ‘goofy and relatable’. And, as media theorist Melanie Kennedy (2020) has pointed out recently, these performers can grab global audiences — by June 2020, a 15-year old American TikTok veteran, Charli D’Amelio, had over 66 million followers.
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