Older People Using TikTok To Defy Ageist Stereotypes, Research Finds (theguardian.com) 57
Older TikTok users are using the online platform, regarded as the virtual playground of teenagers, to defy ageist stereotypes of elderly people as technophobic and frail. The Guardian reports: Research has found increasing numbers of accounts belonging to users aged 60 and older with millions of followers. Using the platform to showcase their energy and vibrancy, these TikTok elders are rewriting expectations around how older people should behave both on and off social media. "These TikTok elders have become successful content creators in a powerful counter-cultural phenomenon in which older persons actually contest the stereotypes of old age by embracing or even celebrating their aged status," said Dr Reuben Ng, the author of the paper Not Too Old for TikTok: How Older Adults are Reframing Ageing, and an assistant professor at Yale University. Interestingly, said Ng, most TikTok elders are women who "fiercely resist common stereotypes of older women as passive, mild-mannered and weak, instead opting to present themselves as fierce or even foul-mouthed," he said. [...]
The paper looked at 1,382 videos posted by TikTok users who were aged 60 or older and had between 100,000 and 5.3 million followers. In total, their videos, all of which explicitly discussed their age, had been viewed more than 3.5 billion times. Ng found that 71% of these videos -- including those from accounts such as grandadjoe1933, who has 5.3 million followers, and dolly_broadway, who has 2.4 million followers -- were used to defy age stereotypes. A recurring motif was the "glamma", a portmanteau combining "glamorous" and "grandma", with videos including those of a 70-year-old woman joyfully parading around the streets in a midriff-bearing top.
Almost one in five of the videos analyzed made light of age-related vulnerabilities, and one in 10 called out ageism among both younger people and their own contemporaries. Other videos positioned older users as superior to younger people. "I may be 86 but I can still drink more than you lightweights" says one clip. "I may be 86 but I can still twerk better than you," says another, showing an octogenarian leaping up from a fall down the stairs with a twerk.
The paper looked at 1,382 videos posted by TikTok users who were aged 60 or older and had between 100,000 and 5.3 million followers. In total, their videos, all of which explicitly discussed their age, had been viewed more than 3.5 billion times. Ng found that 71% of these videos -- including those from accounts such as grandadjoe1933, who has 5.3 million followers, and dolly_broadway, who has 2.4 million followers -- were used to defy age stereotypes. A recurring motif was the "glamma", a portmanteau combining "glamorous" and "grandma", with videos including those of a 70-year-old woman joyfully parading around the streets in a midriff-bearing top.
Almost one in five of the videos analyzed made light of age-related vulnerabilities, and one in 10 called out ageism among both younger people and their own contemporaries. Other videos positioned older users as superior to younger people. "I may be 86 but I can still drink more than you lightweights" says one clip. "I may be 86 but I can still twerk better than you," says another, showing an octogenarian leaping up from a fall down the stairs with a twerk.
So boomers, basically (Score:1, Flamebait)
You've got young folks who are on TikTok because they think it's cool, and aging boomers who are trying to act cool. I wonder how many people are like me, in their mid 40s and don't give a shit about TikTok? I only downloaded it because the former president was threatening to ban it, but I never cared enough to ever actually try using it.
mods on crack, again (Score:1)
I didn't say "(I) don't give a shit about TikTok" to inflame people who actually enjoy watching short format videos with irritating pop music and/or robotic narration. If that's your thing, you do you. I just don't see any utility in the app, since I have no aspirations whatsoever of being an internet celebrity and would never upload any videos, and anything actually entertaining/amusing from TikTok ends up reposted on other social media platforms.
There's also the aspect of it being owned by a Chinese com
Re:mods on crack, again (Score:4, Funny)
"I may be 86 but I can still twerk better than you,"
Sounds just as stupid as
"I may be 86 but I can still drink more than you lightweights"
Proof that age does not always bring wisdom.
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aging boomers who are trying to act cool.
Or perhaps the boomers just enjoy watching videos.
Just because TFA says boomers are doing it to "defy stereotypes" doesn't mean that is plausible. Do you really think boomers wake up in the morning and think, "Hey, I should defy some stereotypes today!"
I wonder how many people are like me, in their mid 40s and don't give a shit about TikTok?
The important thing is that you are able to feel superior to those both older and younger than yourself.
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The important thing is that you are able to feel superior to those both older and younger than yourself.
I honestly don't think the bar has been lowered so much that not liking TikTok is an expression of superiority. I also don't like beer, reality TV, and high gas prices. I think I'm in good company on that last one, though.
Re:So boomers, basically (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd enjoy TikTok videos a lot more if there was a noise filter. A lot of videos have extremely loud, distorted sound that is uncomfortable even at very low volumes. I tend to watch with the sound off, not that I watch it very much at all.
Ideally there would be an option to auto-mute sound if it's either loud or just music with no speech.
Re: So boomers, basically (Score:2)
I am in my mid-forties, I hated it the first few times I used it, but after spending some time on it I have actually had to uninstall it bc I loved it so much and got so addicted I was on it every day.
Tiktok gives you an incredibly organic experience of human beings. I dont know what algorithm is, but my feed quickly evolved in a flood of fringe mysticism, girls who act like cats, and Ukraine war footage, all of which was fantastic when mixed. I literally could not put it down, it was so unrefined and human
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Re: So boomers, basically (Score:2)
Hehe. For me its natural Adderall and meals by mail, but that too.
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Uh, not to put too fine a point on the facts here, but:
"most TikTok elders are women who "fiercely resist common stereotypes of older women as passive, mild-mannered and weak, instead opting to present themselves as fierce or even foul-mouthed,"
The other half of boomers, would kindly say Fuck You Very Much for that assumption.
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"most TikTok elders are women who "fiercely resist common stereotypes of older women as passive, mild-mannered and weak, instead opting to present themselves as fierce or even foul-mouthed,"
So you're saying The Beastie Boys were ahead of their time? [youtube.com]
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You've got young folks who are on TikTok because they think it's cool, and aging boomers who are trying to act cool.
Or. There's a bit of truth there, but some jizz stain decided to cut out all nuance and focus solely on something that's a "team a vs team b" thing so that they'd have something to turn into their editor?
If you enjoy a social media platform, don't let fuck brains gatekeep you. If you hate some or all social media platforms, cool don't let anyone convince you that you're wrong! I'm so done with these idiotic writers trying to make simple things some sort of "picking sides" kind of bullshit. Simple shit is
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Welcome to "modern" journalism. Weird how that aligns well with "higher" education in the US.
Coming soon; Everything Is A Weapon, and Trust No One, especially that "enemy" over there who you thought was merely a fellow citizen.
It used to be funny how the US would make fun of other countries doing this shit. It's not so funny anymore.
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I have a trojan that will steal your banking details and passwords, it's 100% illegal, please install it for me, Mr. Wise Boomer.
Older People Using TikTok To Defy... (Score:3)
Is not only grammatically mangled, it is also a hilarious stereotype itself.
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I don't know about the gameplay, but FortNite's graphics look like Walt Disney threw up.
Apparently you can use cheap Five Below input devices to play FortNite, if you believe the endorsement of that kid with the middle school mustache that they've got plastered on the side of the boxes. Nothing says "get pwned, 12-year-old!" quite like wielding a $5 RGB mouse.
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If you have a high-end graphic card and maxed out the settings, FortNite looks as realistic as a Battlefield game.
Unlike the OP, I'm under no delusion that my reflexes are anywhere near as good as when I was younger. I've fallen off the map more times than I'd like to admit playing the latest Halo, due to misplaced/mistimed grappling gun shots. There's no shame in getting old, it happens to all of us.
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I don't know about the gameplay
TLDR: You'll spend five minutes looking for a decent gun and pretending to be progressing. Somebody will appear with a huge gun and kill you with one shot. You'll spend another ten minutes waiting to play again. Rinse. Repeat.
My takeaway (Score:5, Insightful)
These older TikTokers seem hell-bent on disproving the maxim that with increased age comes increased wisdom.
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These older TikTokers seem hell-bent on disproving the maxim that with increased age comes increased wisdom.
You should see Twitter.
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Growing old is mandatory
Growing up is optional
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Mass Narcissism is so wildly popular right now that Attention Whore is now a highly paid profession. And one doesn't need to be a trained specialist in human psychology to understand that FOMO, affects all ages. We've been bombarded by that fact with COVID isolation taking many lives without an infection.
Combine the potential earnings for those on fixed incomes, with the fact that pretty much all of the family members younger than them now "communicate" via text message and social media chat, it tends to
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I'm with it, I'm hip (Score:2)
Ew, Gross (Score:2)
Just a couple of points about age (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't want to generalize too much, but I find some younger folks (and by that I mean teens and 20s) tend to dismiss older people as technologically incompetent and out of touch. When there have been security problems at work, though, there's generally a young person at the root of them. When there's computer hardware misbehaving, guess who's the only person in the office who has a chance of fixing it. When a simple batch file can solve a problem, there's only one person in the office who can write one, and it isn't one of the kiddies.
Even more to the point, my friend's dad, already in his 90s, got the equipment and mastered the software to create a fully digitized, cross-referenced library of his family's history in Canada going back to the 1920s. The source media included photographs, 8mm movies, video tapes, fragile paper records and more. Once in a while he'd run into a problem with one program or another, and he'd contact one of us for help because he didn't want to screw something up and lose a lot of work, but normally that was just a phone call. When he died at 95, the library was complete and his family has a historical record museums would be proud to own. This man had never even sat in front of a computer until the family got one so he could stay in touch with friends and family half way across Canada by email instead of telephone. Less than a year later, his library project was already underway.
I think maybe my favourite moment so far has been when the new alpha youngling stared at my computer for a minute, then asked why I was taking photographs from the company library for my desktop wallpaper when everybody else was using their own pictures. I just smiled and left it for one of the others to tell him who had taken most of the company photos.
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You're right, my friend. The problem, though, is that quite a few of them believe they're in the light.
stereotypes (Score:1)
t. No one ever
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Old women got old by being mean and selfish.
More like "Older people using TikTok to prey on " (Score:1)
but once the coffin dodgers (Score:1)
65 and Don't TikTok (Score:1)
These people aren't defying stereotypes (Score:1)
a sound use of ones time (Score:1)
"Using the platform to defy agist stereotypes ... these TikTok elders are rewriting expectations"
Ng found that 71% of these videos -- including those from accounts such as grandadjoe1933, who has 5.3 million followers, and dolly_broadway, who has 2.4 million followers -- were used to defy age stereotypes.
said Dr Reuben Ng ... an assistant professor at Yale University.
apparently they give a phd to any one who cares to ask
I find (Score:1)
I find the younger generation so much better at clicking a button and watching a video, really technical stuff.