Culture Shock of the Covid-19 on TikTok: User’s Taste Shift for Video Content in China

Xu Chen

doi:10.54254/2753-7064/7/20230910

Research Article

Open access

Published on 31 October 2023

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Chen,X. (2023). Culture Shock of the Covid-19 on TikTok: User’s Taste Shift for Video Content in China. Communications in Humanities Research,7,294-302.

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Culture Shock of the Covid-19 on TikTok: User’s Taste Shift for Video Content in China

Xu Chen *^,1,

¹ Boston University

* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

https://doi.org/10.54254/2753-7064/7/20230910

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has had a global impact and served as an economic and cultural shock. In 2022, Shanghai was in an entire lockdown for two months due to quarantine policies adopted by China to prevent the pandemic from spreading. During this period, social media became a crucial part of people’s lives, used for communication, entertainment, and receiving news. This article investigates the post-pandemic effect of Covid-19 on social media by conducting a study using customized surveys to examine users’ preference shift of video content on TikTok, China’s most popular short-video social platform. The study found a correlation between TikTok users’ preference shift for short video content and the Covid-19 pandemic in China. The participants were divided into social groups based on age, gender, and occupation, but the study did not find any significant differences in their responses to this correlation. There were high shifts in taste for video content related to the Covid-19 pandemic, such as health news and indoor exercise. The study shows that shifts in the purpose of using social media are significant when experiencing a cultural shock. Users often respond to cultural shock by switching to certain types of video content. Future scholars studying media psychology and exploring the elements that shift consumers’ gratification and purposes of using social media can benefit from this article.

Keywords

culture shock, social media, Covid-19, preference media content, TikTok

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Cite this article

Chen,X. (2023). Culture Shock of the Covid-19 on TikTok: User’s Taste Shift for Video Content in China. Communications in Humanities Research,7,294-302.

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The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.

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About volume

Volume title: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Educational Innovation and Philosophical Inquiries

Conference website: https://www.iceipi.org/

ISBN：978-1-83558-037-0(Print) / 978-1-83558-038-7(Online)

Conference date: 7 August 2023

Editor：Enrique Mallen, Javier Cifuentes-Faura

Series: Communications in Humanities Research

Volume number: Vol.7

ISSN：2753-7064(Print) / 2753-7072(Online)

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