As foils to terrorists, Calasso’s tourists are secularists who want all the comforts of home but avoid places spoiled by tourism.Ĭalasso may be one of the last, best cultural critics of a particularly scholarly kind he engages major thinkers and commands a wide range of sources. In aphoristic, grandiose terms, Calasso explains Islamic terrorism in part as a response to online pornography: “The secular world had invaded their mind with something irresistible, which attracted them and at the same time mocked and undermined them” (5). Here Calasso, an author celebrated for his erudition and critical acumen, sums up contemporary culture by contrasting terrorists and tourists as complementary but opposing figures-“magnetic categories” (64). Consider one recent example: The essay “Tourists and Terrorists” from Roberto Calasso’s The Unnamable Present.
Like the print media where their work appeared, their influence has waned, and while this loss is regrettable, today’s media environment and sensibilities suggest such cultural criticism may soon be gone forever.Ĭultural critics find religion particularly challenging. From Matthew Arnold and Virginia Woolf to Christopher Lasch and Susan Sontag, cultural critics have named trends and shaped public debates, but they have embraced truisms and struggled to explain modern religious life. No less serious but far less complex, cultural critics tend to follow a formula that blossomed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: One Big Idea. Videos labelled “#Death,” for example, have over 930 million views. Conflicts over face coverings, the Middle East, and racist violence have made TikTok a vehicle for change and reflection on serious matters.
By contributing to and commenting on shared memes, trends, and genres, TikTok videos can engage in complex forms of critical commentary and public dialogue. In TikTok, viewers become creators and strangers become collaborators.Īlthough the content of TikTok is managed centrally, the real producers of TikTok are its diverse audiences, who customize their own “For You Page” selections by what they view, like, and follow. Viral trends share common scenarios, text, music, or cultural references, from pranks on family members and pets to raw documentation of political confrontation and acts of racism. Duets invite viewers to post side-by-side with an existing video, creating a dialogue or critical response.
Dance “challenges,” which invite viewers to post their own version of specific choreography and music, helped establish TikTok’s popularity. On matters of contemporary religion, TikTok may be democratizing the role of the cultural critic, sometimes with better results.įor those who don’t know, most TikTok videos run from 15 to 60 seconds and range wildly by topic and technique, clustering in groups that sometimes generate trends of imitators and genres.
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President Trump’s threat to ban TikTok may reflect a fear of free expression rather than the data security issues he cites. World leaders, activists, and corporations have begun taking TikTok very seriously. With over a billion users around the world, TikTok now contains multitudes of perspectives ranging from silly to serious, ingratiating to defiant, personal to corporate. This sample of religiously-themed TikTok videos captures the mix of popular culture, humor, and politics available on a social media sensation made popular by children making dance videos of themselves. Citing the 1936 Olympics in Munich, another woman using the hashtag “#jewish” advocates a boycott of the 2022 Beijing Olympics for China’s treatment of Muslims.
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