TikTok’s Greatest Asset Isn’t Its Algorithm—It’s Your Phone

TikTok’s Greatest Asset Isn’t Its Algorithm—It’s Your Phone

TIKTOK'S ASCENT TO becoming the most popular site on the internet has sparked endless discussions about its stickiness—as if it were capable of hacking our normal cognitive pathways and transmitting messages straight into our brains. For the most part, critical analysis attributed the platform’s effectiveness to its seemingly all-powerful algorithm. Technology critics like Eleanor Cummins and Rob Horning, for example, unpacked the ways users saw the algorithm as a tool for self-discovery—how it seemed to be “showing you who you’ve always been,”

https://datastudio.google.com/s/rDVaFm9bvM8
https://datastudio.google.com/u/0/reporting/67bfd27e-3237-4b65-ab94-123d0a9c1dfc/page/WKB7C
https://posteezy.com/liz-truss-phone-hack-claim-prompts-calls-investigation
https://posteezy.com/tiktoks-greatest-asset-isnt-its-algorithm-its-your-phone
https://open.firstory.me/story/cla8fan6t055v01u916lk6365
https://www.vingle.net/posts/4943342
https://www.pixiv.net/novel/show.php?id=18689828

ensuring an endorsement of content it delivered. Others have dissected the cultural appeal of the algorithm, claiming that it fills a void in contemporary spiritual life by positioning itself as a data-backed deity that reads our swipes and likes much like the ancient oracles did our palms and stars. Taken as a whole, these analyses see misplaced faith in the algorithm as the primary culprit behind our particular vulnerabilities to TikTok.

The overriding focus on the algorithm—and the content it delivers—has caused us to overlook a central part of TikTok’s operating logic: the phone. A failure to fully explore the role of this device in TikTok’s powers of transmission has resulted in a limited appreciation of how the platform works; after all, it’s not simply content, but rather medium and context that inform how we receive information through a given channel