IN WATCHING THE WAR, DO YOU STILL HAVE GOOSEBUMPS?
After two months of what many renamed to the ‘TikTok war’, the formulas regulating the social media platform might jeopardise our ability to feel connected to Ukrainians. A literary review by Simone Pellegrino.
April 29, 2022
Marta Vasyuta was a normal 20-year-old woman before the war started. She studied International Economic Relations at Lviv Polytechnic National University and used social media to watch entertaining content and post personal updates, like everyone else. But on February 24, everything changed.
The devastation of the war in Ukraine, that killed more than 4,000 people, soon produced distressing audio-visual narratives that showed us the most grievous intentions of the invasion. These were cold shocks that interrupted the warmth of peace, the heat of tranquillity, of normality. They gave us goosebumps. They made us tremble. And despite the distance, they reached us, entering the places of our everyday life. Delivered by vehicles we knew already, but also adapting to more immediate, widespread media and reshaping accordingly.
Among the others, TikTok immediately stood out as a virtual front line of the war. Content creators in Ukraine forgot about entertainment, and used popular songs and short videos to spread a message and raise the awareness of their audiences on the atrocities they were experiencing first-hand.
“One of the characteristics of any major crisis is that it starts to intrude into places that are otherwise non-political,” said Professor Grant Blank, Departmental Lecturer at the Internet Institute of the University of Oxford. “It causes a whole additional group of cultural production.”
The war promptly became a trending topic on social media platforms, and their algorithms pushed it to millions of users worldwide. As of April 2022, Marta’s first TikTok video on the conflict was watched more than 52 million times.
“I just had a normal account, with jokes and funny videos,” said Marta, surprised to see such an overwhelming success. “When the war started, I posted what I actually saw and what I was getting from Telegram channels.”
@martavasyuta 🙏🏽🇺🇦 #Ukraine ♬ bringing the era back yall - chuuyas gf
According to a review conducted by The New York Times, the volume of war-related content on TikTok “far outweighed” the number of photos and videos published on other relevant social media. Not surprisingly, this record even led many commentators to rename the conflict to the first “TikTok war” or “WarTok.”
But if this platform and the norms that have been governing its operation and determining its success were to backfire, our ability to feel connected to Ukrainians might be at stake.
In his Aesthetic Theory, originally published in 1970, Frankfurt school philosopher Theodor Adorno criticised the evolution of art and its new socio-political role constrained by capitalist modernity. In the essay, he condemned the commodification that submits culture to the economic interest and the failure of art to represent a reality made up of contradictions, negativity and pain. For him, the aesthetic experience of the beholder is to be defined as “the act of being touched by the other; the capacity to shudder, as if goosebumps were the first aesthetic image.”
Goosebumps are an involuntary reaction of our sympathetic nervous system to something unplanned that disrupts the normal condition of our brain and body. This triggers the amygdala, a brain area that performs a primary role in the processing of memory, decision making and neurophysiological changes such as emotional responses. The amygdala activates the hypothalamus, another region of the brain that also coordinates the activity of the pituitary, our major endocrine gland.
The latter produces adrenaline, a hormone that ultimately touches off our ‘fight-or-flight’ response and engenders goosebumps.
In pop culture, they were often associated to fear. In 1992, American author R.L. Stine published the first of a successful series of horror books under this name. More recently, in 2016, American rappers Travis Scott and Young Thug used goosebumps to describe a particularly rousing love in a song that also featured Kendrick Lamar.
Cold disrupts warmth, fear disrupts confidence, loudness disrupts gentleness, war disrupts peace. And we have goosebumps because we experience the unexpectedness of that change.
“Young people in Ukraine have been using social media platforms to share live images of the war set to compelling soundtracks and to provide heartfelt accounts of unfolding events that capture younger audiences in ways that mainstream media do not,” said Professor Regina Marchi who, along with Professor Schofield-Clark, published the book Young People and the Future of News: Social Media and the Rise of Connective Journalism for Cambridge University Press.
In the case of TikTok, the choice of uplifting, trending songs in the background of never-watched-before war videos might have contributed to our initial reactions.
“Music-evoked chills are thought to have different elicitors including sudden changes in acoustic features such as loudness or consonance, surprising musical events and expression of emotions through music,” said Dr Marcus Pearce of the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary, University of London, whose expertise covers music perception.
But the success of war-related contents on the platform, that even turned Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy into the leader of a TikTok ‘occupation’, also depended on the functioning of its ‘For You’ page.
The way that TikTok employs its algorithm to serve its users is based on the engagement and activity of a certain video. Likes, comments, shares and views regulate its spread: the more of these it gets, the more likely it will be part of a user’s feed.
The subject matter and the language of a content are also central. TikTok is able to recognize hashtags, on-screen and pronounced words, which will be later translated into categories and interests. If these respond to current trends, that video might reach millions of people.
But trends, almost ontologically, imply a reproduction. The latter might have two divergent but equally thought-provoking consequences: the necessary quest for a new trend when the first would be used up or the passive, unexperienced, unaware consumption of those audio-visual contents.
“I don't think people are going to get acclimated to seeing war images or feeling war reporting,” said Professor Blank. “I think the horrors of the war are too real for people to get desensitised to them.”
Marta Vasyuta, who kept posting war and political videos over the last two months, disagrees.
“Young people don't really want to see that much of war content anymore,” she said. “Trends get over really quickly and people want to watch funny videos again. Some even commented: ‘Oh, I thought the war was already over’.”
According to a report published in 2022 by Global Web Index, a London-based audience targeting company that profiles consumers and provides audience insight, the main reason users gave for using TikTok was ‘funny or entertaining content’.
In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, from 1935, another Frankfurt School philosopher called Walter Benjamin gauged the risk that capitalist, mechanical reproduction would invade the traditional areas of the arts, such as creativity, genius and the timeless uniqueness of the aesthetic experience.
The social backdrop of his epoque, marked by the first mass-produced and mass-sold products, he wrote, could advance to the point of destroying the identifying ‘aura’ of the works.
The aura, that perhaps acquired a distorted meaning over time as if it was a fetish patina, should be intended in its Greek sense.
Etymologically speaking, ‘aura’ means breeze. Being touched by that breadth would mean having the full, conscious experience of reality. Having goosebumps would allow a complete contact between the beholder and what they watch. Otherwise, the attention towards Ukraine, the connection that this society and its zeitgeist are able to provide, might be lost in what would become a dangerously overlooked, old trend.
“The war is not only on TikTok or other platforms. It’s about people and their real life,” Marta Vasyuta said. “It's really happening.”