week 5: blog post 7 assignment

 

The invention I plan to talk about is Tiktok. 

TikTok is a social media platform that allows the user to upload videos either short, or long form content of your choosing. As a user you can scroll and watch endless videos of your liking. You can also promote products on this app and make money via commission off of your videos

This app caught on and spread because it was different from other social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, etc. on those platforms, its more of a "get to know you" and a way for people to connect with other. While you can also text/communciate with people via Tik Tok, Its main purpose is to provide people an outlet to causally post whatever is they want. Whether it is them dancing to a song for seven seconds, or ranting about political issues for minutes on end. This app also targets a younger audience which makes up for most of social media users. new-social-media-demographics

Some people choose not to adopt til Tok because the app can become very addicting. Since there are millions of small-large scale videos that you can endlessly scroll through, it can be easy to see yourself just scrolling for hours on end and not paying attention to the time. I have a multitude of from who have just deleted tin Tok entirely because of how much time they wasted on it just scrolling endlessly. 

The main reason a lot of people, especially older people may not want to download data is for security purposes. Tiktok has full control over your data when you are using the app and according to an article by Ottawa University "The company collects sensitive data about users even when they don't save or share content". tiktok-use-privacy-risks

I do not know if the positive outweighs the negative. On one hand Tiktok is a phenomenal way of looking at and producing all sorts of content of your choosing. On the other hand, it can be an issue of security and privacy for users, and the app itself can also become addictive. I think you weigh out the cost to benefit analysis with a new technology by simply asking yourself "is it worth it". will this technology advise enhance my life or just make it worse. do I get more or less from this technology mentally and is it safe to use?