My Own Internet Archive Blogging

My latest binge has been saving TikTok videos. Now, I am genuinely interested in preserving the app, I think it is a good showcase of people’s thoughts and feelings of the time, including things such as politics, clothing, trends, and foods. But I am also partly using it as an excuse to be on TikTok more, oops. It’s okay, I have other hobbies, and I do them frequently. Anyway, there is definitely going to be some survivorship bias here; some people have it set so that their videos can’t be downloaded and I’m not going to the effort to screen record them, especially since it doesn’t let you have it on clear mode when you do so. Then there is also the fact that I will probably miss some videos, or I won’t remember to save them. I also try not to save videos of children unless I think it is something that really needs to be saved. I do wish that saving the videos kept the captions. It has the credit to the poster at the end, but no caption, and of course no comments, which make up a lot of the experience of using TikTok. I understand that it would be very hard to keep these as there can just be so many but it feels like a loss. So, I’m downloading the videos onto my phone, and will at some point load them onto a hard drive. My most recent ones have been:

• A fit check with a weird dance with Tubthumping by Chumbawumba in the background. This video will show what this person is wearing, the badges on their blazer, their makeup, their gender expression. It will show how they dance. It will show a snippet of a song (one that hopefully won’t be lost for a long time cuz it’s very much a banger). And it will show what the inside of their house looks like, in this case: the top of their stairs, their wallpaper, their curtains, their carpet.
• A person cutting their hair in the garden and dunking it in a stream. This will show what they are wearing, their jewelry, their hairstyle before and after. It will show their garden. It will show a bit of the music they used. And it will show whatever weird stuff they’re getting up to because I have no idea what that was about.
• A drunk woman saying that a roundabout looks like a pizza. This shows what her clothes are for going out at night. It shows what that area of their city looks like (it really does look like a pizza). It shows her accent, and the swear words she uses.
• Another fit check with a woman dancing and another woman leaning in from off the screen to join in. This shows the outfits of both of the women, their jewelry, their makeup. It shows their lovely bedroom and the décor in it, including lace hanging from the ceiling. It shows a snippet of Jolene by Dolly Parton. It shows the woman’s dance, and their interactions with each other. And it also shows that the woman who leans in has armpit hair and isn’t afraid to show it off, which gives a statement on the progression of today’s society. Oh, and there’s a cat in the background.

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