What Makes TikTok Such a Challenge? Look to the Cute Cat Theory.
What a 2008 theory about online creative content explains about the geopolitics of today’s internet.
Este artículo está disponible en español también, traducido por Juan Arellano.
TikTok’s been in the news lately, for obvious reasons.
It’s worth noting what the challenge is here. Ethan Zuckerman’s Cute Cat Theory of the Internet is instructive. Here’s a summary from Wikipedia:
It posits that most people are not interested in activism; instead, they want to use the web for mundane activities, including surfing for pornography and lolcats (“cute cats”). The tools that they develop for that (such as Facebook, Flickr, Blogger, Twitter, and similar platforms) are very useful to social movement activists, who may lack resources to develop dedicated tools themselves. This, in turn, makes the activists more immune to reprisals by governments than if they were using a dedicated activism platform, because shutting down a popular public platform provokes a larger public outcry than shutting down an obscure one.
TikTok is a different beast from Huawei, another Chinese company that’s had its own snafus in the West. Here’s how Michael Schuman explains it in The Atlantic:
