Understanding the popularity and affordances of TikTok through user experiences

In this paper I discuss the affordances and popularity of the short-video app TikTok from an audience studies point of view. I do so by drawing on findings from ethnographic fieldwork with young adult TikTok users based in the United Kingdom that was conducted in 2020 and 2021. I trace how using the app, specifically scrolling through the TikTok For You Page, the app’s algorithmic content feed, became a fixed part of the everyday routines of young adults. I show how TikTok appealed to them as a convenient means of escape and relief that they were unable to find elsewhere during and beyond times of lockdown. Further, I highlight the complex nature of TikTok as an app and the active role that users play in imagining and appropriating the app’s affordances as meaningful parts of their everyday social life. Closing the paper, I reflect on future directions of TikTok scholarship by stressing the importance of situated audience studies

Theorizing “Stories About Algorithms” as a Mechanism in the Formation and Maintenance of Algorithmic Imaginaries

In this article, I report from an ethnographic investigation into young adult users of the popular short-video app TikTok. More specifically, I discuss their experience of TikTok’s algorithmic content feed, or so-called “For You Page.” Like many other personalized online environments today, the For You Page is marked by the tension of being a mechanism of digital surveillance and affective control, yet also a source of entertainment and pleasure. Focusing on people’s sense-making practices, especially in relation to stories about the TikTok algorithm, the article approaches the discursive repertoire that underpins people’s negotiation of this tension. Doing so, I theorize the role and relevance of “stories about algorithms” within the context of algorithmic imaginaries as activating users in sense-making processes about their algorithmic entanglements

Discussing the role of TikTok sharing practices in everyday social life

A crucial element of TikTok consumption is the act of sharing TikTok videos with others, such as friends. In this article I draw on fieldwork with young adult TikTok users based in the United Kingdom to investigate this practice. I show how people use TikTok’s For You Page as a resource to facilitate social relationships at a distance and in settings of physical co-presence. I highlight how TikTok clips are shared in a phatic manner to activate social relationships, for example through communicating messages of ‘thinking about you’ or relating to others through referencing TikTok memes in everyday conversations. Attending to sharing practices, I argue, provides a fruitful way to understand how self-identities and interpersonal relationships are articulated in increasingly social media environments increasingly organized around the logic of ‘personalization’

Communicative forms on TikTok: Perspectives from digital ethnography

TikTok is an app that allows people to create, share, and consume short-video content. Although only available internationally since 2017, it has already been downloaded more than 2 billion times and has around 800 million active users. Public interest in the fleeting and seemingly random video clips that TikTok hosts is high. In fact, it has grown steadily since the time of the Twitter-owned short-video app Vine that ended its service in 2016 with only a quarter of TikTok’s current userbase. However, despite this steady growth in popularity, observations and theorizations of short-video apps like TikTok remain lacking. In this article, I thus seek to address this lack by critically discussing how to study short-video communications from the bottom up and by presenting the results of an exploratory investigation into TikTok and its communicative forms. Doing so, this article contributes to opening a space for serious engagement with this burgeoning yet understudied element of digital culture in the future

Desperately Trying to Mediate Immediacy

Evermore aspects of contemporary cultures, societies and human life appear to be changed through processes of digitization and mediatization. A great body of work is touching on these processes of change. However, not many discuss aspects of leisure and aesthetics. And if they do so, seldom regarding bodily and worldly aspects. This paper thus seeks to discuss such changes alongside the phenomenon of esports. More precisely, the paper situates the aesthetic dimension and practices of watching and doing esports in contemporary cultures and societies, focusing on lived experiences (ästhetisches Erleben) in digital and mediated contexts. The failing attempt to understand, the attempt to re-present and Gelassenheit (composure or serenity) are introduced as modes of coping with immediate aesthetic experiences. Here, especially the constitutive transition from a physical to a meta-physical dimension of reality will be grasped on. By that, ongoing philosophical debates about the constitution of reality and being can be supported in their progress

Clothing Sacred Scriptures

According to a longstanding interpretation, book religions are agents of textuality and logocentrism. This volume inverts the traditional perspective: its focus is on the strong dependency between scripture and aesthetics, holy books and material artworks, sacred texts and ritual performances. The contributions, written by a group of international specialists in Western, Byzantine, Islamic and Jewish Art, are committed to a comparative and transcultural approach. The authors reflect upon the different strategies of »clothing« sacred texts with precious materials and elaborate forms. They show how the pretypographic cultures of the Middle Ages used book ornaments as media for building a close relation between the divine words and their human audience. By exploring how art shapes the religious practice of books, and how the religious use of books shapes the evolution of artistic practices this book contributes to a new understanding of the deep nexus between sacred scripture and art

Der Blick auf den Osten – eine Kunstgeschichte à part

Peer Reviewe

Convex Mathematical Programs for Relational Matching of Object Views

Automatic recognition of objects in images is a difficult and challenging task in computer vision which has been tackled in many different ways. Based on the powerful and widely used concept to represent objects and scenes as relational structures, the problem of graph matching, i.e. to find correspondences between two graphs is a part of the object recognition problem. Belonging to the field of combinatorial optimization graph matching is considered to be one of the most complex problems in computer vision: It is known to be NP-complete in the general case. In this thesis, two novel approaches to the graph matching problem are proposed and investigated. They are based on recent progress in the mathematical literature on convex programming. Starting out from describing the desired matchings by suitable objective functions in terms of binary variables, relaxations of combinatorial constraints and an adequate adaption of the objective function lead to continuous convex optimization problems which can be solved without parameter tuning and in polynomial time. A subsequent post-processing step results in feasible, sub-optimal combinatorial solutions to the original decision problem. In the first part of this thesis, the connection between specific graph-matching problems and the quadratic assignment problem is explored. In this case, the convex relaxation leads to a convex quadratic program , which is combined with a linear program for post-processing. Conditions under which the quadratic assignment representation is adequate from the computer vision point of view are investigated, along with attempts to relax these conditions by modifying the approach accordingly. The second part of this work focuses directly on the matching of subgraphs -- representing a model -- to a considerably larger scene graph. A bipartite matching is extended with a quadratic regularization term to take into account relations within each set of vertices. Based on this convex relaxation, post-processing and the application to computer vision are investigated and discussed. Numerical experiments reveal both the power and the limitations of the approach. For problems of sizes which occur in applications the approach is quite reasonable and often the combinatorial optimal solution is found. For larger instances the intrinsic combinatorial nature of the problem comes out and leads to sub-optimal solutions which, however, are still good