A Guide to Children’s Culture for Adults Out of Touch With Reality: What Is #DeathTok?
This week’s Guide Out of Touch looks at the many different ways technology is impacting youth culture. On the one hand, the constant connection to devices leads to such ridiculous trends as eating dog food and plastic candy wrappers. On the other hand, children are using technology to help each other deal with hard things like death and illness in ways that would not have been possible for previous generations. So it’s a real mixed bag.
The Serious Side of TikTok: Death and the Pandemic
It’s easy to think of TikTok as the home of lip-sync videos, silly tasks, makeup tutorials and bad advice, but two recent trends show kids using the platform to talk to each other about literal life and death issues.
#DeathTok : When I was a teenager I thought I would never die so I never thought about death at all. But judging by the #DeathTok videos, Gen Z loves to think about death. Not in a goofy, gothic way, but instead, considering and accepting the reality of death. Popular videos tagged with #DeathTok look at the end of life from every angle, from talk about the logistics of preparing corpses from undertakers and funeral directors , to videos describing alternatives to traditional burial methods , to videos asking if one’s tattoos can be preserved after death (can). Of course, there are jokes too – dark, death-focused jokes that you’ll only find funny if you’ve been there .
Pandemic : The third anniversary of the start of the COVID pandemic has just passed, and TikTok is celebrating the occasion with a meme. To a triumphant guitar solo from Harrison Saltzman’s cover of ” Slipping Through My Fingers “, zoomers reflect on how the pandemic has changed their lives, under the headline: “Things that will send me into a coma in March 2020.” The videos are personal and confessional—hardly free of young people’s scrutiny of self-importance—but generally have a positive tone. The kids used their time in lockdown to sober up , become famous , and generally improve themselves . (I just watched a lot of TV.)
The Ridiculous Side of TikTok: Eating Dog Food and Candy Wrappers
When you turn 25, you don’t need to be told not to eat plastic or dog food, just because you’ve probably already tried it. Young people have not yet touched the stove, so many of them burn their fingers ridiculously. Here are two examples.
Eat dog food for profit: It all started when influential online bodybuilder Henry Clarisi made a silly TikTok video promising to eat protein-rich dog food if he gets 15,000 likes. He ended up with over 2 million, and being a man of his word, he ate a few bits and pieces “for profit”. This led to many people trying it and Henry released a video in which he said , “People, that was a joke ! Don’t eat dog food!” For the record, dog food won’t kill you, but it’s not intended for human consumption. Bad taste and not useful. (Yes, I used to eat some dog food when I was younger. For fun, of course.)
Eat plastic : Eating fruit rolls with ice cream is a trend among people with simple tastes, but this online fool decided to simplify the recipe by omitting the ice cream and simply tearing apart a frozen fruit roll, apparently with plastic. still attached. Enough people have replicated this trick that the official TikTok Fruit Roll Up has seen fit to post a video advising everyone not to eat the plastic that covers the fruit peel because it is plastic . It also indicates that the first guy’s video is fake because you can’t just bite off the plastic because it’s frozen.
Viral Video of the Week: Amazing Invention – This Drone Will Change Everything
Marc Robert usually makes silly engineering and science content, but this week he posted a video that is far more mind-blowing and serious than the Squirrel Olympics or glitter bombs for parcel thieves . The technology described in his video actually lives up to the hype surrounding the title ” Amazing Invention – This Drone Will Change Everything “. Zipline is using innovative drone technology to quickly deliver sandwiches to wealthy Westerners, but they are also using it to deliver much-needed medical supplies to hospitals in Rwanda. Judging by the video (and I realize this isn’t necessarily safe to do online, and there might be another side to the story), Zipline’s improvements to the idea of little helicopters dropping things on your doorstep could actually make the technology feasible. And it exists now. Widespread adoption will mean almost instant delivery of everything you can order and far fewer cars and trucks on the road. But even more important is what the company is doing in Rwanda. They use miniature drones to deliver life-saving medical supplies to remote hospitals. Not theoretically, but in reality. Right now.