Question Three: The History of Popular Culture
Proposal: TikTok as a Popular Culture
My research paper will be focusing on the history of popular culture. I will try to dig dip on Tiktok as popular culture, when it started, who the founders and its audiences were, and why it came into existence, its influence on society, and its main elements. Also, I will examine theories related to the research focusing on popular culture characteristics, effects, similarities, and differences in folk culture. My tentative hypothesis is ‘Despite Tiktok introducing a new era of interactions with new audiences, many people have deconstructed its purpose and resulted in defining it using psychological or moral aspects through its connection with the mass media and social control.’
The paper will examine the compatibility of the theories associated with popular cultures such as the Frankfurt school, cultural populism, Marxism, and postmodernism theories in trying to relate TikTok’s association with mass communication and the societal construction. I will need to review how the folk culture shaped the emergence of Tiktok through tracing the connection points in terms of similarities and differences in the two cultures’ characteristics. As well, I will use other scholar’s studies to argue and prove my line of thoughts regarding Tiktok’s development as popular culture. The event involves the rise of interdependence between social life and popular culture and new communication technologies.
If I were working on this paper, my main focus would be in evaluating the history of Tiktok as a popular culture where I would use peer-reviewed essays regarding different takes on the research topic. I would also determine earlier literature that talked about the popular culture in general and its connection with the folk culture and social control. Consequently, I would like to reconsider some aspects of Tiktok in terms of political, economic, and cultural life, as well as its sociological implications in terms of cultural sociologists take. Also, the issue of integrating both the folk and popular without undermining each other space or harsh judgment by society would be the issue I would like to further concerning Tiktok as popular culture research.