Society & Culture
TikTok is not merely the motherlode of cringe content. It is India’s fastest growing social media application: Indians spent 5.5 billion hours on the app in 2019. TikTok is allowing a whole new India, one that lives in tier 2 and tier 3 cities, one that does those jobs that we consider ourselves too dignified to do, a chance to live a life that need not be defined by caste, class or religion. Content creation it seems now, is no longer an upper-middle class kink. Nonetheless, it is not without its myriad issues: India has continually tried to ban TikTok over concerns of privacy, pornography and Chinese spying. What does the app say about the way certain forms of creativity and expression are considered cringe while others are deemed woke? And what do these countless complexities, of privacy, class and identity, both philosophical and political mean for our democracy? Is TikTok a great liberator or merely the new opium of the masses? Atharva and Atish discuss these questions and more over the two part episode. They are joined for the first time, in the history of So Phi Podcast, by a guest. Amrita Kashyap, is her own words, "is an unpaid TikTok enthusiast and a part-time musician (???? ??????)." She is studying journalism but considering today's economy, hopes to make money off the finer arts (????? ????? ?? ???? ?? ??????). Let us know your thoughts, by emailing us at contactsophi.official@gmail.com, or reach out to us on our handle @sophipodcast on Instagram!!