Opening Argument: Can Avatars Ever Compete With Crock Pot Chicken?
When Facebook's whole "we're changing our name and focusing on the metaverse!" presentation happened this week, there was a lot of very understandable confusion in my various social media timelines. Not the least of which was about the fact that the avatar Zuckerberg used to represent himself was so ... boring. And honestly, so familiar. As one of my Twitter correspondents noted, didn't it look kind of like Second Life, the "create your own avatar" technology now mostly remembered in pop culture (as far as I know) for its influence on weird episodes of both The Office and Law & Order: SVU?
There has long been a belief on the part of some in tech that we all wanted to create lifelike versions of ourselves and then watch those versions of ourselves go skydiving or cycling through Paris or whatever. We have been promised avatars many, many times over, and it's not as if the interest in virtual reality isn't real. It very much is!
But it's hard to get around the fact that all of this is supposed to capture younger users who are interested in TikTok, and it's hard to think of anything that is more low-tech, more low-fi, more "the sheen is beside the point" than TikTok. TikTok is full of bad lighting, bad camera angles, awkward cuts, janky-looking captions, misspellings, terrible editing ... and nobody cares. It doesn't prevent anybody from acquiring followers.
That's not to say there aren't people using TikTok for cool filmmaking or great-looking video; there are. But TikTok as a general marketplace of ideas is full of stuff like people dancing in their bedrooms, cleaning their sinks, showing off shoe storage, making crock-pot chicken (seriously, crock-pot chicken TikTok is ... an entire universe unto itself), and lip syncing to the sound from other people's videos (or movie dialogue, or whatever). TikTok is utter chaos; that is part of its charm. TikTok is somebody showing off shapewear, then somebody putting decals on mason jars, then somebody making candles, then somebody dancing, then somebody's kid farting, then somebody's dog falling off the sofa. TikTok is YouTube, but much much more informal and stream-of-consciousness, and think about what that means. (To be clear: I enjoy it greatly. It has recently started feeding me videos of people making dice, which I find fascinating.)
I am unconvinced, given my own wanderings on TikTok, that what young TikTok users want is a clean landscape in which to imagine themselves in sweatpants and a hoodie, parasailing. Having sat down to entirely too many Zoom calls, I am unconvinced that young TikTok users -- or anybody else -- will ever be convinced to play chess or fence or eat lunch with an avatar and consider it meaningful. Will they hang out online? Of course. Do they broadly want that "I gave my avatar a mohawk!" experience that we've been hearing about for a couple of decades? Maybe they do; I am not a member of this demographic. But nothing about TikTok -- nothing! -- makes me think that the way to court those users has anything to do with hyperrealistic immersive settings in which to attend virtual concerts.
If Facebook (sorry, Meta) really wants to land those TikTok users, can I suggest they open up an entire department to create air fryer recipes?
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We Recommend:
There's a great piece in Vulture this week in which Craig Jenkins talks to Dave Grohl -- perhaps the most game man in pop culture -- about pain and loss, music and bands.
The second season of HBO MAX's Love Life is out this week, and the opportunity to see William Jackson Harper (whom you may know as Chidi from The Good Place) in a straight-up romantic comedy is really, really lovely.
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