Background

So recently scrolling through TikTok, I came across this video from an account: inka.innka Showing how TikTok shows different variants of your face based on your current geolocation to cater to that specific reason. This was sort of this eye opening moment for me, leading up to this rabbit hole. Here are my thoughts.

@inka.innka Have you noticed that TikTok by default actually changes your face when you post videos from Nepal?

Ever since the launch of social media platforms, there have been evolutions of content that dominate these platforms. In the Early days of Facebook, we all remember everyone sharing their everyday lives with how they feel on their digital walls. And rightfully, it was something new for us all. I remember the days when merely being able to create a fb account was a great achievement because the concept was soo new. It was a gateway platform for so many new internet users.

//Forms were limited, needed smth new to keep the engagement going because it's the pillar of the attention economy. These tools were designed in a way that kept us coming back to these platforms again and again.// needs works

The shadows of bias have cast a long history, an indelible part of human existence.

From Texts to TikToks

So we have experienced a rise of geotagging, tweets for your shower thoughts to photos for your precious moments. Ever since the inception of snapchat, it revolutionised the sharing of photos/ short videos to your circle but it wasn't as widely adopted until the platform like TikTok formerly known as 'musically' that bombarded internet with short pills of gratifications in form of clips that scoured all these other medias to the bandwagon.

Thus with the rise of these visual media, it had to be made easy for everyone to encourage in presenting themselves on these platforms. The card these platforms had were filters, the concept of beauty standards have always been a debate. These filters fulfil the desires of humans to fit these century long parameters. It got engrained to these readily accessible mediums. Thus making it possible for everyone to look quote on quote "beautiful" within a click of a button.

But what's the problem in wanting to look beautiful one might ask? As Aldos Huxley argues in his book, Brave New World. The dystopia doesn't always come in the form of a big brother figure as projected in George Orwell’s 1984, it can be so friendly that it wouldn’t require an authoritative figure to enforce it, we would readily go to these places ourselves. Wait, this sounds familiar?

According to one story published by WSJ, teens are finding themselves less and less confident in how they look and with a rapid rise in that number every year. This phenomenon is slowly shaping how we see ourselves, how we aspire to look.The rising popularity of beauty filters means they are shaping what being beautiful means, thus the rising number of plastic/beautification surgery to make them look like these filters. This phenomenon is widely known today as "Snapchat dysmorphia."

Social media has been shaping our world, whether we see it or not, this probably needs no explanations. As Tristain Harris argues in one of his famous talks, ever until the rise of technologies like mass storage and camera systems there needed no laws to govern the concept of public privacy. As technological innovations are always at the forefront of societal disruptions, they always have the first mover advantages into these seemingly grey zones of societal order. This possesses them with not just power to manoeuvre law and order but the order that is yet to arrive. This is an immense power for anyone , even more so for free economies as we continue to see value in the amount of growth that we see.

I realised it's so easy to lose yourself to this complex nexus of morality and righteousness. These are not the kinds of discoveries that lead to a conclusion nor the solutions. But remember you have the most valuable treasure that everyone these days is fighting for, your attention. The attention that is being capitalised, attention that is hard to come by in a world where you (uncle sam pointer), yes you are the centre of attention. As we are the products of the attention economy, maybe it's time for us to value it ourselves and reflect on it?