It’s 6:00 in the morning. You wake up, get dressed, and maybe just spend five minutes scrolling through TikTok before you head off to school.
When you get home, you open the app again and keep scrolling for around 20 minutes. After your extracurricular activity for the night, you open the app multiple times while trying to complete homework.
You finish the work and get ready for bed, but before you actually fall asleep, TikTok consumes another 45 minutes of your time.
By the time you are asleep, you have spent a total of 75 minutes on TikTok for the day.
This is the reality for many teens in this day and age.
Through many minutes of app usage, teenagers have become addicted to using TikTok, an app designed for people to create short videos, typically with music.
The app TikTok stemmed from the app Musical.ly in 2018 and gained tremendous popularity throughout 2019. The app has become a great entertainment source for teens, however it has become a huge distraction from schoolwork and other priorities.
TikTok is a video streaming app where people can post videos with different music sounds.
Originally, the app was called Musical.ly and it had similar concepts to what is known now as TikTok. Now, the apps are perceived in very different ways due to different trends.
For a long time, people claimed that having TikTok was just a joke, but today it is very popular to create videos on it.
The increase in user activity justifies how addictive the app has proved to be.
The app has been ranked in the top 10 most downloaded apps. These statistics highly support how addictive TikTok has become.
According to oberlo.com, TikTok currently has over 500 million active users and users spend an average of 52 minutes on the app each day. Essentially, the app has taken over Gen Z.
From personal experience, TikTok can be very time consuming and irresistable.
There have been instances where I am hanging out with friends and the majority of the time we spend together revolves around TikTok.
Sending TikToks back and forth in group chats has also become a trend.
Making videos on the app or watching other users videos has become a pastime for teens, as it is now a part of some daily routines.
TikTok has definitely become a huge distraction, but it is a good distraction because it entertains people with humor. The app proves to be not all that harmful, as it can be a stress reliever.
It has become a well known app for many reasons, especially one being that it is similar to Vine, a popular video creating app from 2013. Vine had a similar aspect to TikTok because short videos ranging from a variety of different topics were posted.
Another reason why spending time on the app is so addictive and popular has to do with the trending creators on the app.
Multiple people have become “verified” on the app, making them a viral TikToker.
Many users instantly think of famous TikTok user Charli D’Amelio, age 15, who is famous for posting short dance videos on the app. Her posts have encouraged other users to learn dances and post videos of their own.
The amount of videos that are posted on TikTok along with the time spent on the app contribute enormously to the popularity and fanfare around the app.
Teens must prioritize other things such as schoolwork and activities over TikTok because of its great compulsiveness.