She says she’s just checking a video her friend sent earlier. Ten minutes later, she’s still on the couch, eyes fixed on the screen.
An upbeat song plays as a group of girls gleefully perform the latest viral trend. Scroll.
A young influencer invites viewers to “get ready with me” in an ultra-tidy room. Scroll.
A rescue cat lives a life befitting a queen. Scroll.
A voice murmurs: “If you feel like giving up, don’t.”
She blinks, unsure of how she feels now. Sad? Comforted? Drained? Inspired? Not enough? She can’t tell. But something has shifted inside, and it no longer feels like she’s just watching videos.
Scenes like these are now part of daily life for many young people. Scrolling TikTok has quietly replaced hours once spent watching television, reading books, playing outdoors, or speaking face-to-face.
TikTok is no longer just a passing trend. It has become a dominant source of entertainment, information, and emotional engagement.
By early 2024, Malaysia had nearly 29 million TikTok users aged 18 and above, making it one of the country’s most widely used platforms.
Decades ago, media critic Neil Postman issued a powerful warning: the medium is the metaphor. He argued that every medium speaks its own language, and to truly grasp its message, we must understand the language it speaks.
For Postman, the dominant medium of his time was television. And television, he said, spoke in the language of entertainment. Even serious content, like news, had to be reshaped into an entertaining format to survive on screen.
Postman cautioned against treating all content as neutral, because the medium itself influences how we receive and interpret the message. If we overlook that, we risk misunderstanding – or failing to understand – it altogether.
Or, as Marshall McLuhan famously put it: the medium is the message.
To understand why we scroll TikTok, we must first understand the language it speaks.
TikTok inherits the entertainment language of television but intensifies it by appealing directly to emotion – or affect. While emotion has always played a role in entertainment, TikTok takes it further. It turns emotion from a supporting element into the main event.
Where television tells stories with structure, segments, and characters, TikTok communicates in rapid, feeling-based bursts. Short videos appear one after another, tailored by algorithms to evoke maximum emotional response from each individual user.
Feelings of awe, envy, tenderness, anxiety, validation – and more – come and go at lightning speed, leaving little room for pause or reflection.
Each video is designed to provoke a reaction, to stir something in the viewer. And because these emotional sparks are fleeting, we keep scrolling, hoping the next video will move us again – just as quickly.
Much of the concern around TikTok tends to focus on screen time. But beyond quantity, we must also ask about quality – specifically, the emotional quality of what our children are experiencing.
We are not merely watching videos or absorbing facts. We are feeling, constantly. Emotions that once arose through lived experience – joy, anger, envy, inspiration – are now triggered by an endless feed of curated clips.
In this way, TikTok’s hook lies not just in its content, but in its stimulation of affect – of emotional response.
As TikTok becomes embedded in the daily lives of teenagers and young adults, it’s essential for parents and educators to understand the emotional grammar of this platform.
Without that understanding, it’s easy to dismiss TikTok as a frivolous time-waster. But TikTok is more than that. It speaks directly to the emotional brain, offering bite-sized content designed to soothe, provoke, excite, or distract.
To help our children navigate this digital terrain, we must first learn how it works – what it gives, and what it quietly takes away.
And perhaps, we must gently reintroduce the richness of direct experiences, so that our young people may feel fulfilled – naturally, and in their own time.
The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of Twentytwo13.
