Over the last two decades, the popularity of different social media platforms have ebbed and flowed. While some have weathered trends, others have quietly faded into obscurity – Facebook’s as strong as ever, but who uses MySpace these days? Who remembers Digg?
Increasingly, social media use is stratified by generations. You’ll find more Gen Xers on Twitter than you will on Snapchat, for example. In the same way that you don’t hang out at the same bars or listen to the same music that your parents did, different generations prefer different platforms.
Which is why it’s incredibly cringy to see members of older generations – particularly celebrities – try and jump on the bandwagon of ‘younger’ platforms.
TikTok is perhaps the prime example of this. Not only is it a more youthful platform, both in terms of who uses it and how long it’s been around, but also when you consider the kind of content it encourages and revolves around. Viral dance trends, lipsynching to music, ‘challenges’ and duets… It’s very performance-based, as opposed to the highly-curated, ostensibly more ‘refined’ aesthetic that platforms like Instagram cultivate.
When you’re 15 years old, videoing yourself bopping along to a viral pop song in your bedroom is totally fine. But when you’re a multi-millionaire millennial celebrity footballer like Brazilian superstar Neymar Jr., it’s just embarrassing. The Paris Saint-Germain forward shared a TikTok video of him dancing with his baby mama’s husband (that’s a weird dynamic) to his Instagram account, and it’s incredibly painful to watch.
We’d like to apologise for inflicting that on you…
Neymar might only be 28, but we reckon that if you’ve got kids, you’re too old for TikTok. It just comes off as a cynical ploy to get more social media traction – although he already has over 143 million followers on Instagram, so I don’t see how he needs any more.
Maybe we’re being too cynical here. It’s just a bit of fun, and if these grown men want to make tits of themselves dancing on TikTok, go for it. Hell, it can even be a bona fide business strategy – take a look at 52-year-old Italian playboy Gianluca Vacchi, who’s built a career out of unbridled narcissism and age-inappropriate antics.
But you won’t see us starting a DMARGE TikTok account any time soon.