A friend of mine from college is currently working as a fifth grade teacher at an elementary school in Denver, and as part of her curriculum, she likes to set her fifth graders up with older pen pals so the students can practice writing letters. One of my other friends thought this was cute, so she decided to help out and be a pen pal for a student.
Now, anyone who has ever even glanced at a fifth grader knows that if you give an 11-year-old a pen and paper, they will scribble out literally everything that is on their mind at that exact moment, and none of it will make sense or be in any logical order, and you'll spend half your time trying to decipher their horrible handwriting and the other half cackling at the nonsense.
But what this fifth-grader said in her first letter to her new pen pal I found fascinating and kind of scary.
"What type of girl are you? Are you a granola girl or what?"
The student was referring to the "types of girls" on TikTok, including but not limited to granola girls, VSCO girls, Baddies, plant moms, art girls...it's a thing, according to Google. They're different aesthetic groups that people (in this case, girls) self-sort themselves into and ultimately end up in the echo chamber of. In essence, once you start watching a lot of granola girl content, TikTok begins serving you up more granola girl content, and then you begin to identify with granola girl, and before you know it, you are a granola girl. Simple as that.
I heard the anecdote about this student a few months ago and it hasn't left my mind since. It saddens me to know that out of all the more enjoyable and playful things an 11-year-old could have and should have been thinking about, she was concerned about her TikTok identity.
God, I would hate to be young right now.
TikTok is one of my favorite topics to write about. It's an absolutely unprecedented rise of a media platform, and although a lot of users might see it as an innocuous way to share funny videos, we're only beginning to see how toxic Instagram and Facebook were now that time has peeled back some of those layers, and TikTok's much more powerful algorithm and Chinese ownership gives me every reason to believe TikTok will end up having even more harmful effects on society. But while these conversations around the effect of algorithms on society normally center around political polarization and radicalization, I want to talk briefly about the effect I think TikTok's algorithm could have on identity.
To be a young adult is to be in a constant scavenger hunt for identity. We all have felt it. You're old enough to know you want to stand for something but not old enough to know what that is yet. So we begin defining our identity by the things we like. That's why we have Beatlemania and the BTS Army. It's a clunky and uncomfortable process, but the important thing is that it's a process, and it lasts throughout your entire adolescence. You try the yellow eye shadow and you realize after far too many weeks that you hate the yellow eye shadow so instead you try being a yoga pants person for a few days and that's much better but still isn't enough until you see Harry Styles for the first time on YouTube and realize you no longer really believe in that God thing the priest was yapping about so you make your mom drive you to the Harry concert and you sit in beer-dampened felt chairs with your best friends and sing the hell out of "As It Was" and never take your parachute pants off again. You keep slowly carving out exactly who you are, and by your mid-20s, you have a sculpture.
But now we don't need that process. Now we have TikTok, and TikTok gives us "identity-by-numbers." If you're in fifth grade and beginning to decipher who you are, you don't need to reach for the yellow eye shadow anymore. You log onto TikTok, and it has fifteen identities prebuilt for the taking. You decide you want to be granola girl, and so you get the faded orange beanie and the flannel sweatshirt and that pair of leggings that looks good but not good enough to look like you're trying, and before you know it, you're granola girl. Simple as that. (To be clear, this issue isn't exclusive to girls, but I think it's fair to say young girls often feel more pressure to "fit in" than young boys, so the issue is probably most prevalent with them.)
Identity-by-numbers is comforting because you skip a lot of the headache of finding identity. But it's not interesting. It's a net decrease in individuality, and if there's anything we've learned from the last 70 years of world history, it's that diversity is good for society.
This is far from the first time we've had "types" or "groups" of people. Just watch The Breakfast Club or go to a My Chemical Romance concert. Young people have always gravitated towards stereotypes to feel like they fit in and have a sense of belonging. The difference is now we have a hyper-targeted algorithm siloing us into this single identity sinkhole inside a media platform that has a more direct highway to our frontal lobe than any I can think of from the past. These forces pushing us into identities are stronger than ever because they're specifically engineered to be highly addictive, and they have all the data to make it so.
Am I being overdramatic? Yes. We are (likely) not going to see a world-ending collapse in individuality because of a single app. But I think the seed of the idea is real: this identity-by-numbers phenomenon that exists on TikTok is going to make it a lot harder for fifth graders to comb through the muck and discover who they actually are, not who the internet tells them they should be. And I'm worried to see what repercussions this could have on their long-term development. For this reason and for a host of others, it's time TikTok implements strict, verified age gates to avoid slipping further down this path.
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