Introduction to the Media International Australia special issue on “TikTok cultures in the Asia Pacific”

Abstract

The editors of this Feature Topic are founding members of the TikTok Cultures Research Network that focuses on culturally-situated and qualitatively-grounded scholarship on TikTok in the Asia Pacific region. This Feature Topic collection for Media International Australia is our second in a string of Special Issues on TikTok, each primed to interrogate the platform from different scholarly vantage points while remaining committed to surfacing, highlighting, and strengthening research from, by, and about contexts in the margins. In this Feature Topic issue, we focus on the Asia Pacific region to understand the socio-cultural impacts, creative circumventions, and agentic employments of TikTok since its installation. Given the timing of symposium and intellectual inquiries, these studies have also naturally considered the cascading impacts and consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on platform use, meaning making, and the habitable spaces we make for ourselves and for each other in times of crisis.

TikTok and Political Communication: The Latest Frontier of Politainment? A Case Study

“…TikTok has grown into one of the most popular social media platforms, reaching over one billion monthly active users in 2021 (We Are Social & Hootsuite, 2021) and becoming the highest-grossing app in the world in 2022 (Perez, 2022). Around 80% of the users are between the ages of 16 and 34 (Iqbal, 2022), making TikTok Gen Z's favorite social medium (Abidin et al, 2022).…”

“…Nonetheless, while general TikTok research is booming (Abidin et al, 2022), specific academic research about how politicians and political parties use the platform for promotion, communication, and especially campaigning is still extremely scarce.…”

“We Are Bulletproof”: The Transcultural Power of Fandom in #StopAsianHate

“…Fans actively follow the activities of their artist online, seeking out ways to ensure their success alongside promoting other strategies of fan activism such as bus advertising and online petitions (Jung 2012). Such dedication manifests in digital promotional techniques and campaignsfor example, one common strategy across fandoms is to post tweets en masse using agreedupon specific hashtags in order to create trending topics that are noticeable to the "general public," becoming a topic of interest for parties who may not have been originally invested (Abidin and Lee 2023). K-pop fan practices are institutionalized as forms of effective science communication, where knowing how to identify potential misinformation, attract wider audiences, and constantly adapt to changing digital practices (such as evolving rules for streaming sites or charting) demonstrates digital media literacy and knowledge gained through time and effort (Abidin 2019;Lee et al 2022).…”