How The “Renegade” Sparked Criticism Over TikTok Originality

The newest social media app craze, TikTok, has taken over the social spectrum. People ages 7 to about 25 create their own original videos to post in hopes of impressing their followers and potentially making it on the “For You Page” and going viral. Now, although all content that is posted but be original (as in there is no retweeting, sharing, or timeline aspect of the app), many of the videos are dances, like the renegade, that are made up by a single person. 

Taking a look at these, we can see a clear example of cultural transmission that we recently learned about. The definition of cultural transmission as given in the lecture slides is, “The process through which digital content moves from one person or a group of people to another, sometimes changing in the process”. 

TikTok star Charli D’Amelio often uses her platform to show herself recreating these dances. As the video trickles to her 30 million followers who send it to their friends, like the video or post it on Twitter, it begins to gain popularity. Many users even find themselves recreating the dances. See how the chain works? As with a game of telephone, the dances get modified through transmission. Dances get personalized and moves get changed. Users often add their own twist to the dance or just simply have fun with it and unfortunately the one who creates the dance often gets none of the credit. 

The viral effect becomes clear at the expense of giving “original credit”. Recently as we saw in the news, the moves of the Renegade were NOT created by Charli D’Amelio as most had presumed, but instead by 14-year-old Georgia teen Jalaiah Harmon. Charli performed the dance which went viral but failed to ever give credit to Jalaiah. After some social media searching, Charli was alerted to this and the two eventually met up and performed it together. A nice tribute for the most popular TikTok dance. Charli received some backlash but after tracking down Jalaiah, she redeemed herself in the world of social media and now tries to always credit the “TikTok choreographer”.