To start off the data collection process, I looked at content posted under multiple sociology-related hashtags, including #sociology and #sociology explained. I found that most of the content under #sociology centered around the unknown nature and purpose of sociology studies. For example, there were many TikToks posted about sociology majors not being able to explain what exactly they are studying. For example, one of the videos showed a sociology student who was asked “What have you learned in sociology?” and responded with “We live in a society.” My initial impression of these data is that sociology remains an extremely interdisciplinary field that relates to so many other subjects (like history, economics, psychology, and others) that it is hard to explain its nature in simplistic terms that are expected on TikTok.
Since one of the goals of this project is to analyze what major sociological theories are present on the platform and how they are interpreted, I turned to the #sociology explained category. From the initial data collection process, I identified some of the biggest topics and prevalent theories that seem to be the most visible and popular.
- I have collected many TikTok videos that grapple with the concept of a social construct. Many videos provide the definition of a social construct and use it to explain and deconstruct a variety of phenomena, ranging from race and gender and ending with mathematics. Some of these TikTok also include a call for decolonization of knowledge. A couple of the TikToks also went deeper and elaborated on the argument that because something is a social construct does not mean it does not have real/material effects on people, such as, for example, money and money bills.
- Two other big categories that I have noticed are educational videos on the history and systemic nature of racism and intersectionality. I have seen two videos that referenced Kimberlé Crenshaw and her work on intersectional experience of Black women.
- Another big topic that I have identified is capitalism. I have collected a video explaining different types of capital (social, economic, cultural), as well as the Marxist theory.
- Some other videos that I have seen covered the topics of cultural appropriation versus assimilation, social solidarity, as well as parallels between sociological theory and popular media (such as recognizing how a Taylor Swift’s song talks about hegemonic masculinity).
It is important to note that most of these videos did not have just an educational purpose but were rather made from an activism perspective. Most of the videos I have seen so far were created in response to other user’s comments, either replying to questions or addressing/deconstructing harmful oppressive statements through the sociological lens. Some of the videos were also “calling out” certain dominant groups and were made to educate those groups specifically on their position and privilege in society.
When it comes to the producers of knowledge, it seemed like the majority of the sociology content creators are sociology college/university students, primarily women and people of color.
What has been the most challenging about collecting data from TikTok is that I do not think having a representative sample of data is possible. Given the tendency to develop new fast trends and use hashtags, we cannot claim that certain patterns we discover are representative on the whole platform because it is very likely we will miss other content categories/hashtags or will only analyze data that is trending/in high demand only in this particular short time period.
My next steps are to keep collecting TikToks and begin grouping them by themes. That will hopefully allow us to see how the same theories/phenomena are presented from different perspectives and also get some quantitative insight into how prevalent a topic is.