what are you searching for?

~encyclopediac

This is the question I have been asking myself for the past nine months. When the TikTok ban was about to go into effect (temporarily), I scrolled through my thousands of saved videos and wondered what exactly I had imagined I would do with them. Very few were useful: a dozen album and book recommendations, recipes and poems. Most were 15-second clips of connections, a familiar buoy in the digital Atlantic. And so I asked myself,

What am I searching for?

Scrolling feels like a search. Each new video contains the hope of that thing, that treasure, but I never seem to find it. In fact, social media increasingly feels like one of those hallway mirages, where the door at the end stretches further and further away with every step. Social media increasingly feels like a waste of time and a waste of potential. But I am a hopeful creature, and search I will.

Through the luck of the algorithmic draw I stumbled upon a rather beautiful and intriguing art project that, at the encouragement from viewers, had become a series by the artist. It was never intended to be anything but a shot into the void, and thus was so saturated with intimate creativity, each addition done with love and craft, that it has lingered in my memory when all other videos fade. It is precisely the fact that it was not intended to feed the algorithm that I remembered it.

I can't help but wonder if that's what social media like TikTok is meant to be. A place where artists, musicians, and intellectuals come to share hard work from outside the app. The best videos are always full of intention and hard work. The best creations make me want to create. They push me to push myself, out of appreciation for what I have consumed and the want to add to this Internet canon in a meaningful way.

Nothing I am searching for will be found in the algorithm. It cannot be plucked out of the masses and handed to me. I will remain looking for it, in books and community, and I will find parts of it in all those things that are not created for mindless consumption.

What are you searching for?