Examination of TikTok Application in the Axis of Uses and Gratifications Approach, User Experience and Entertainment Culture

Abstract

With the innovations brought by the developing technology in the 21th century, there have been changes in the fields of culture, entertainment and communication. Thanks to these innovations, the media has gained the opportunity to reach individuals. As a result of the restrictions during the Covid 19 pandemic, social media applications come first among the environments where individuals have fun and make use of their free time at home. TikTok differs from other social media applications in terms of its content. Audiences who cannot take part in traditional media not only have the opportunity to have fun in their natural state through TikTok videos, but also have the opportunity to become a phenomenon with the short videos they shoot. Today, users with millions of followers gain experience and earn income thanks to this application. It is possible for any individual to be known for 15 seconds with a video they share in the TikTok application in this way. For the sake of this possibility of being liked, individuals strive to prove themselves with all their creativity in the videos they produce. In the current study, 1000 content randomly coming to the TikTok home screen and 10 TikTok accounts with the most followers were selected as the universe with the purposeful sampling method. The data obtained were evaluated in the context of uses and gratifications approach in terms of entertainment culture and user experience with the qualitative content analysis method. The TikTok application has also been structurally examined in terms of user experience. The aim of the study is to reveal the relationship between the contents of the TikTok application, which surpassed even the most popular domain name "google" in 2021, in terms of entertainment culture and user experiences. As a result of the research, it was determined that the TikTok application intensely contains negative content such as violence, sexuality and humiliation. In addition, it has been determined that users produce entertainment content in the contents of the TikTok application, which bears the traces of digital culture.