Hegemony: leadership or dominance, especially by one country or social group over others.
the behavior of its members in any given situation.
Cultural norms theory: A theory of mass communication which suggests that the mass media selectively presents, and emphasizes certain contemporary ideas or values. According to this theory, the mass media influences norms by reinforcing or changing them.
It is 2020 and I as a resident in United States live in a media landscape dominated by companies for the most part headquartered in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle and New York City. Over the last decade online activists have pressured America's media to subtract content that is un-affirming to LBTGQ, obese women, blacks and latinas. Media has been shamed into praising poor, fat(females only) and gay.
WOKE/Feminist/Marxist activists have deftly pruned and reshaped social media, movies and advertising we see and re-share by years of shaming campaigns, with news outlets reporting on the shaming campaigns and in effect normalizing their extreme illiberal intolerance by covering it in the plain vanilla mainstream news sphere.
Enter a giant wildly popular social media phenomenon...that is headquartered in Bejing. (Please leave aside the question of national security risk, or communism and focus on cultural influence. I really don't think those Korean/Japanese/Chinese dancing and lip-syncing young women are communist soldiers)
Back to headquartered in China. Finally, a company that would be deaf to a social justice shaming campaign coming from (for example) a student organization at UC Berkely. China is just too big a population of consumers to worry about an American sub-group.
Not because Chinese companies are rude, rather... ironically... they are not used to American censorship via our social justice warriors. And not only is the company not perceptive nor receptive to this pressure, I would posit the users/consumers on their platform wouldn't bend their behavior to please American militant leftists.
The illiberal conservatism of the American Left casts a long shadow, that thankfully ends at the west coast, and thankfully there are other big wealthy sophisticated cultures that can produce content that avoids the intolerant pathologies of American social justice ideals.
In the U.S. the Left have worked deftly to change society to omit the heterosexual default in public discourse.
Heteronormativity: the belief that heterosexuality, predicated on the gender binary, is the default, preferred, or normal mode of sexual orientation. It assumes that sexual and marital relations are most fitting between people of opposite sex. A heteronormative view therefore involves alignment of biological sex, sexuality, gender identity and gender roles.
Backtrack a little for context and intent. I am presenting these views without respect to religious ideas. I am agnostic-atheist, and for the most part China is also. I do support gay rights to live happily, safely and with access to any right heterosexuals have. I am not on offensive against gays, rather, I am on the offensive towards Leftist illiberal extremism and offering that TikTok is a giant counterforce to that extremism.
Gender and orientation aren't the only domains TikTok sets up a counter to WOKE. Wired magazine had a cover story on why the West should be suspicious of TikTok from a values standpoint. The writer takes up a sizable op-ed to claim "digital blackface" is rampant on the platform.
The Wired article is talking about this: hundreds of thousands of cute Asain girls use black male rap tracks as the audio track to lip sync and/or dance to, the Asian girl being the video star and the rap is the soundtrack. The point of view of the Wired piece is black culture is ripped off. The Asian girls probably see few to no black people, and use rap without any real care for people of color.
I counter that this cultural appropriation is beautiful, a natural result of an interconnected world, and art, especially digital copies of art, have no borders.
If TikTok is bought by an American company I fear the new owners will care what that Wired piece said, and the subsequent waves of shaming, which will kill everything good on the platform.
Enough with the set-up and meta statements. Let me plunge into presenting instances on the TikTok platform that support my assertion (talk about and quote several TikTok videos).
First up is minseonk1m and her English language teacher skit. https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMJDUcc4y/
The laugh is she pronounces Coke as cock. Beyond the humor what is a useful challenge to American queer-friendly feminism and the whole gender fluid and Questioning nonsense. This video shows a strikingly beautiful Asian female assertively being as sexually binary as possible. She strongly wants the sexually opposite. She is a good role model for confused American females.
Another video (https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMJDUcwBg/ ) by minseonk1m uses a female rappers track, and the gist is an aggressive hetero female with zero solidarity with other women.
Lialiu_chinese has a cute video (https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMJDyepDo/) teaching the phrases "ni hao" meaning hello, "niang" means mother, and "ni hao niang" means... "you're so gay".
TikTok has challenges for it's video makers. Some audio track is put on the platform and video makers are to use the audio to make a 'face zoom' vid, or dance, or some collage to reflect the song.
The challenge is competitive, goal is to get the most views and likes. TikTok pays per view.
One challenge is an audio track of black male voices saying "which chicks will you NOT date?" and several replies of 'Asian'. The audio ends with an Asian female voice saying "what are talking about? You can't even get in that side of the club". Asian girls use the audio and make videos with them looking stunning and not-assessable on the last words of the track.
Another challenge has girlfriends entering a room surprising their boyfriend by being totally nude. It's POV and the girl isn't seen, just the boyfriend's reaction.
There is a #foryou hashtag, and the vids are overwhelmingly young fit females in revealing clothes or bikinis and word bubbles asking guys what they think. The #foryou hashtag is completely general, often beautiful Chinese mountains or cities, a few animal vids. But the dominant content is sexy females trying to appeal to men. I've never ever seen an unattractive person on #foryou. I've never seen unattractive scenery in the background of any video. There are rumors TikTok screens out poverty and unattractiveness.
A final note. TikTok is driven not by the social network paradigm. It is pure cutting edge Chinese machine learning. And I as an American citizen, praise it, want to use it.
Posts
