Obsession or Addiction?

You might hear your friends saying they are “addicted” to the app Tik Tok or you might even be saying that yourself. For the few people that might not know, Tik Tok is a media app used for creating and viewing short videos. This app currently has 500 million active users that are from 155 different countries.

Everyone seems to love this app. Although 41% of the users are from ages 16-24 it has a growing number of older adult users. Clearly this app is not exclusive to anyone, having elders, adults, young adults, teens, and kids, 56% are male and 44% are female. You might be wondering what the hype of this app is all about. Why is the average time spent on Tik Tok 52 minutes per day? Why are 1 MILLION videos viewed every day? There is no set answer for this so I asked a few Tik Tok users to give me some information about their experience with the app.

First I talked to Weedsport junior Suzie Nemec,

Q1: How long do you spend on Tik Tok per day?

A1:  5 hours and 23 minutes.

Q2: What do you enjoy most about Tik Tok that causes you to spend so much time on it?

A2: It is very entertaining.

Then I talked to sophomore Diego Ventura who actually creates Tik Toks to get some feedback about what it’s like to be a Tik Tok creator. 

Q1: What do you like about making videos?

A1; “I like dancing

Q2: What made you decide to start making videos?

A2: My friends made me decide to start making them.

Q3: Do you spend more time watching or creating videos?

A3: I spend more time creating.

Q4: How much time do you spend watching videos?

A4: ¨I spend like an hour a day watching.

Clearly people spend countless hours on Tik Tok, and I myself can admit that I also spend a lot of time on Tik Tok daily. I went to settings and looked up my screen time for the app, I spend roughly 3 hours and 17 minutes on Tik Tok a day.

I would say that I have an obsession with the app as do most people my age. There is a fine line between obsession and addiction. An addiction is not being able to stop taking a certain substance or doing a certain activity or thing. Someone could definitely stop watching Tik Tok if they had to or wanted to. An obsession is an idea or thought that continually preoccupies or intrudes on a person’s mind. Therefore many people are obsessed with Tik Tok.