Dimensions of TikTok Use among Upper Egyptians for Expressing their Personal, Social, and Cultural Identity

Gamal Abdo, Khaled

doi:10.21608/jkom.2024.395353

Dimensions of TikTok Use among Upper Egyptians for Expressing their Personal, Social, and Cultural Identity

Author

Khaled Gamal Abdo

Faculty of Mass Communication, Cairo University

10.21608/jkom.2024.395353

Abstract

The primary objective of this study is to explore, analyze, and interpret the goals, dimensions, and characteristics of the virtual presence of Upper Egyptians on the TikTok platform and its role in the expression and construction of their digital social identity. A comprehensive analytical approach was embraced to identify how the Upper Egyptian users exploit all the linguistic, artistic, and expressive affordances that the application provides to reveal and assert the features, characteristics, and properties of their original social and cultural identity through the video posts they produce, share, and circulate. The study draws upon a modern approach to examine online communication and interactive processes, known as the “Social Identity Model of Deindividuation Effects”, which is used to explain how social media users present themselves within virtual communities in light of their social and cultural affiliations. A total of 400 videos were coded from a sample of 20 TikTok accounts belonging to users from the Upper Egypt region. Standard content analysis and qualitative multimodal discourse analysis were utilized to investigate sample videos and pages, in addition to participating in 60 hours of live videos aired by the owners of these pages. The results showed that despite the tendency of most videos to express individual and personal aspects of identity, cultural elements were more prominent in terms of the language used, the content and locations of the shots, the music tracks, and the written texts on the screen. Also, live meetings with the followers were marked by a cultural flavor in terms of traditional clothing, the dialect of speech, the songs accompanying the broadcast, and the nature and templates of the live videos themselves. The findings reflect the need to study user-generated content through a social and cultural lens that could reveal the dimensions of the process of constructing digital identity on the internet.

Keywords

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