#rp26 speaker Simon Meier-Vieracker: How do TikTok & Co influence the public sphere?

TikTok leads the way: algorithmically curated feeds and audiovisual content now largely determine what constitutes digital public spheres. Now, other social media platforms are following suit. On the various platforms everything happens in parallel: activists mobilize, politicians provoke, scientists explain. Anyone who wants to be successful in this highly competitive attention economy of the For You Page must adapt to the platform's logic and aesthetics; imitate what others are doing and, with luck or bad luck, become a meme. Can this work out? What is TikTok doing to us, and what are we doing with TikTok? Linguist Simon Meier-Vieracker provides answers to these questions at #rp26.

Simon Meier-Vieracker is a professor of Applied Linguistics at Dresden University of Technology and an award-winning science content creator. As @fussballinguist on social media, he scrolls through TikTok for you and asks what it means for science and politics to be visible and audible on these platforms. Last year, he published the book “TikTok - Memefication and Performance” together with Friederike Fischer and Lisa Niendorf, in which the authors analyze the video platform from a cultural studies perspective.