How We Hang Out at Work Together Online Now
Ever seen someone flip a coin with a forklift? Just place the coin on a hard, smooth surface. So does fabricating a piece of salmon with the edge of your hand, instead of more slowly, with a knife — or chopping dozens of perfect slices of cucumber with increasing speed but without looking. Or of capping a ruptured water line as it sprays mud all over the place? What happens if you pet the sloth you care for at the zoo? Sometimes, it pets you back. Maybe, for no particular reason, you’re curious about what goes into a predeparture check for a Boeing 737 Max? It’s alarming: A robotic voice recites various notifications as screens light up: pull up, wind shear, wind shear, wind shear, terrain, obstacle, obstacle, pull up. All of this I learned on TikTok, the wildly popular video app that people seem to have a hard time describing. It’s an app that’s unapologetic about wasting your time. Perhaps you’re curious to see the kitchens of every restaurant chain you’ve ever been to, at their best and worst, or to watch a carefully choreographed super-speed dishwashing routine, or about how Kind bars get made, or how to run casing down a freshly drilled oil well? Laying down new railroad ties looks satisfying, you might discover on TikTok, while removing old rotten ones looks tedious. TikTok, which encourages users to contribute short videos to hashtags, or to join in on jokes or challenges or to sing along with clips of songs, has, in its manic and frequent demands for content from its users, become an unlikely force for labor visibility. Image
Shaun Douglas Duenas gives a glimpse of work between jokes and memes. “The platform can sometimes be a means of relieving yourself from the stress that any job can bring,” said Shaun Douglas Duenas, a TikTok user. Mr. Once, he shuttled viewers through a 15-second tour of an empty commercial jet ready to be restocked and cleaned, edited to the rhythm of “Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows.”
“People were shocked that I don’t act or do film but work for an airline,” he said. There are hashtags for most major retailers and restaurant chains, full of employer-specific gripes, jokes or observations. There are also more generally relatable sketches. Nobody appreciates the customer who shows up a minute before closing. Many videos are shot on break. Some are shot on the way from one job to another. There are hashtags that are widely applicable to employed people, like #coworkers, #working, #bluecollar and #lovemyjob. Gary Kinsey, whose handle is @chefgkin, is a salmon skin removal expert (and private chef). People do share their jobs on any large social platform. But on TikTok, which is relatively new, users are frequently shown content from people they don’t know. Creation is low-stakes and popularity is extremely unpredictable. Users are incentivized to keep their profiles open to the public if they want to grow. This cuts two ways. Browsing one of the bigger work-related hashtags might turn up the satisfying surprise of a video of a man separating a piece of salmon from its skin with a single sweeping motion. (Sample comment: “thats one sharp hand u have.”) But its poster — Gary Kinsey, 44, of New York, who describes himself as a traveling model chef (as in modeling and cooking) — was surprised as well. It was strange and unexpected, he said— but mostly just nice. “I received a video of a lady in Atlanta who attends culinary school stating she learned the fish skill from the video,” he said, “and that meant a lot.”
The writer and technologist Paul Ford has suggested that the growth of YouTube, through its millions of videos shot on webcams, allowed a narrow but illuminating glimpse into peoples’ homes. “The curtains are drawn. It’s daytime. TikTok has arrived at a time when mobile devices are far more integrated into our daily lives and in which sharing from one, wherever you are, is a default behavior. YouTube is now a workplace unto itself. In the long run, the successful YouTuber’s job ends up being YouTube. TikTok’s priorities will make themselves clear over time, should it stick around, and perhaps they will have no need for the break-room vent sessions, or the shot from the paratrooper dangling his legs out of the back of a plane. For now, however, people are filling this new space with what’s right in front of them. March 10, 2019