Critiquing TikTok as a stage: Investigating Confessional Performance on TikTok and its capacity to cultivate feelings of intimacy and communitas within a community of young adult users

Abstract

The presence of loneliness, exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, is a persistent issue facing young adults in South Africa and abroad. Social media platforms, specifically TikTok, afford a sense of social interaction for those socially and geographically separated. One avenue for this interaction is through the production of increasingly confessional content on the social media platform. In this paper, I identify this presence of confessional content on TikTok and trace its roots to Confessional Performance traditions. I then interrogate the potential of Confessional Performance on TikTok to establish intimacy and elements of communitas. Irem Sot’s article entitled Fostering Intimacy on TikTok: A platform that listens and creates a safe space (2022) provides beneficial insight into the role TikTok’s algorithm has in establishing a sense of intimacy and community amongst its dedicated users and is used as a vital point of reference throughout the paper. Through the addition of an autoethnographic creative research approach, supported by thorough desktop research, I can outline the initiation of intimacy and community on TikTok, which begins with a moment of confession and continues when a second party validates this moment. Furthermore, I create and analyse my confessional TikTok series, ‘I want to talk to you, I want you to talk to me’, paying close attention to audience interaction experienced during this series as a means to a) reflect on the interpretation of intimacy and communitas through the lens of both a TikTok creator and viewer and b) determine the capacity of this kind of confessional performance on Tik Tok to successfully (or unsuccessfully) cultivate intimacy and communitas.