Communicating in the age of TikTok

I have three sons, the eldest being 15, followed by a 10-year-old and a six-year-old. They're typical kids with a vast range of interests and bubbling over with energy - and they are all, in some way, already devoted to social media. Now I've spent the better part of my professional and personal lives engaging in the glorious art of communication. I love nothing more than a good conversation with someone who challeges my views and expands my knowledge of the world we live in. And I devour content wherever I can find it, online, in books, the radio and TV, even those old fashioned things we call newspapers and wherein my communications career first began.

Until having kids, I pretty much thought I was across all the possible mediums that could deliver to me fresh insights, and sometimes new battlegrounds (aka X, formerly know as Twitter). But boy was I wrong.

Our kids now have access to each other - and to information, good or bad - in ways that go far beyond the humble mobile device. I first noticed it when we were living in Singapore, and Jack, our eldest, began spending time gaming in ernest. He'd be in his room chatting away while shooting someone in Fortnite, and I realised he was in a group match with his friends back in Australia. They played and laughed and chatted like they were in the same room, which is ironic now that we are back in Australia and all three of our sons now play together online, and chat through their headsets as if they are in the same room, only they are in the same room, or at least the same house.

It blows my mind that they communicate this way, although it's better than when a headset is not working and they simply shout to each other from their rooms.

The danger, as we discovered, is when they're in some massive game play and they're chatting to people they don't know, and who may be any age and from anywhere in the world. As parents we have to regularly check the profiles of people who have 'befriended' them online, deleting the ones we think are suspicious, and simply worrying about the others.

Then there's TikTok and the myriad of other apps that let kids interact in ways we never dreamt of.

My wife's a singer and we often accompany her when she does an away gig on a weekend. It's an excuse to pack the kids into the car and go stay at some beachside village for a day or two. We often take Jack's best friend Zander. Our seven-seater SUV is packed to the gills, with Jack and Zander invariably sitting side by side in the back seat. And they are TikToking each other the whole way.

Initially I thought they were simply bone-crazy, until I discovered that they're in fact tagging and sharing and posting content they enjoy. My 10-year-old has recently joined in on the conversation, now making his own TikToks (although he has far stricter supervision than my eldest). My six-year-old desperately wants in, but we've managed to keep him banned from it, for now anyway.

Old-style road tripping ...

But the whole thing got me thinking about the way communication is changing, and what it means for the world. When I was a kid, my friends and I exchanged sports cards and listened to our favourite albums, or went to the movies to watch the latest from Hollywood.

Now, our kids are creating those things and sharing them to the whole world. They're not content to be fed information, they want to create it and disseminate it. That's a fundamental shift that is having a huge impact on the world.

Where once huge organisations controlled what we saw, read, and heard (and by default, what we largely thought) now anyone with a phone can compete for the same eyeballs. And the kids are doing it amazingly well, while on the flip-side, the big companies are struggling to figure out how to stay relevant. Millennials and Gen Zers could care less what CNN or NBC has to say about something. Chances are they've already moved on by the time a desperate marketing department has released its latest Tweet.

It's why brands are embracing so-called influencers, self-styled social media stars with a following in the tens of thousands liklely gained by something as inane as a twerk, or throw-away line. But the problem for brands in embracing these influencers, is they have no control over them. Even big-bucks sponsorships means zip to someone who watches the cash roll in from his or her's latest 30 second grab.

And the impact these influencers have on their followers can be immense. My kids recently went batshit crazy, and I mean crazy, for Prime, an energy drink spruked by some guy named Logan Paul who is famous for some rubbishy and 'edgy' content he splashes across YouTube and TikTok. He's got a YouTube following in the tens of millions and recently released Prime, his new energy drink, which has enough caffeine in each bottle to keep a small Italian village happy for a month. And it tastes like shit, to be honest.

But my kids were quickly swept up in the Prime craze, and my wife and I spent days and weeks saying 'no' until her sister bought all the latest 'flavours' for her kids and our's just went apoplectic at the thought of being the only human children on Earth who didn't know what Prime tasted like. So we gave in.

$14. That's right. $14 for a single bottle of the stuff. And noooo, our kids couldn't share a bottle. What were we? Communists? So nearly 50 bucks later our kids had their Prime. They crowed about how amazingly awesome it was, like gold sliding down your throat. Then we spent six hours watching them bounce off walls and each other and finally collapse in a heap. The next few weeks were hell as new 'flavours' were released, each one a 'must have collectible dietary sensation' our kids would simply die without. Everyone at their school had Prime. Why were we so cruel as to deny them every single 'flavour'.

So I tried Prime one day at work. A real-life millennial who worked for me bought me a bottle. I chugged it down with a wince because it genuinely tasted like crap, and 20 minutes later I was gasping behind my desk with heart palpitations. Talk about out of touch. My whole team of 20-somethings thought it hilarious as they watched me suffer, while downing their fifth bottle for the day.

A few weeks later, Logan Paul and his demon drink were history, my kids moving on to the next 'big thing' and quietly admitting that Prime tasted pretty bad after all.

My point is though, Prime didn't do a day's advertising on mainstream media. Not one. It achieved all its success (and billions in sales), thanks to one social influencer and a campaign that sat on YouTube and TikTok.

I realised while writing this, that my youngest son Byron, aged six, has never in his life watched a day of free-to-air television. In Australia with have a few big networks named not so creatively after the numbers they used to occupy on the old televsion dials. So we have Nine, and Ten, and Seven, just like we have the Great Sandy Desert, the Snowy Mountains and the Great Barrier Reef (creative naming is not an Australian strong point).

I used to work for Nine's digital division, making online content for the network's mainstream programs. Nine was the behemoth of Aussie media, making Australia's first billionaire in the process, Kerry Packer. It dominated communication in this country for decades.

The late billionaire Kerry Packer.

Now? Nine is sliding towards extinction, desperately releasing digital channels in the hope of arresting the ascendency of streaming platforms. But the writing is on the wall.

Byron, my youngest, watches YouTube, Netflix and Disney. The joys of running to the bathroom and making desert during a 90-second commercial break are beyond his wildest imaginings. He just picks and chooses what he wants to watch, and the streamers make recommendations so it's even easier for him.

He navigates a remote control with ease, and it's only going to get better for him. I feel like a dinosaur, though for a middle aged guy, I'm pretty tech-savvy. Byron also likes to create, and some weekends he and our middle son Phoenix will spend hours filming themselves in some activity or another, and with minimal help from us, they're posting to YouTube or TikTok (you try telling kids about so-called age limits on these platforms. Good luck with that!)

I actually have a strategy in play at the moment wherein I subtly introduce 'news' to my eldest Jackson. Stuff on the Middle East, politics, religion etc to get him to explore beyond the information dopamine he gets from TikTok.

"Yeah I saw that on TikTok," he will reply. And he has. A 40-second grab of the major event of the day, compressed and trivialised and 'explained' by an influencer looking to release their own energy drink. I patiently explain the issue in more detail, giving context and impact assessments as I learned to do as a journalist back in my early career.

I seem to be getting through to him but it's always hard to tell. He is presented in a few hours with more information than I would have absorbed in a week when I was his age. And it's all 40-60 second 'grabs' before swiping onto the next piece. Their brains must be frazzled trying to do what developing minds do, filter and compartmentalise.

We try to restrict the amount of time they spend online and on devices. Thankfully all three enjoy their sport, and we have a pretty active lifestyle, with a new cattle dog puppy adding to the daily exertion required.

But it is a losing battle. The way we engage with each other is changing, and I mean a fundamental shift that makes it hard to predict where it will go next. And I've always been good at predicting trends and shifts largely because as a journalist you tend to be across multiple topics, from all sides, all the time.

Yet it is hard to see where all this is going. I can see one major impact of all this easy access to snippets of information presented in flashy style. Younger people pay far less attention than they used to. And that's not me being an old whinger. I work with people across various ages and demographics, and for more than 35 years, and I've never seen a generation so easily disengaged. They simply don't want to sit for hours absorbing something. They want it fast and concise and if it isn't delivered that way you see their eyes glazing over. And to be fair to them, they seem more than able to absorb information quickly and get on with it. Where they seem to lack is the depth that drives deeper comprehension. They can follow instructions, yet often struggle to formulate solutions.

The advent of artificial intelligence is only going to exacerbate this trend. As we hand over our more complex thought processes to an AI we get the instant satisfaction of completing a job quickly, or more easily and thoroughly, but we deny the brain the thought training it needs to become an effective tool.

It's why in my communication workshops I encourage participants to read and listen, more than talk and view. Why? Because reading is the number one way to train our brain to become more adept at comprehension, which leads to higher levels of problem solving, and more effective, concise communication.

Listening allows us to consume information we might find vital to getting the outcome we are looking for. Listening allows our minds to expand and grow, providing neural connections that link information to comprehension processors, making us smarter, faster.

Listening also gives us time to formulate our thoughts and responses, which in any kind of communication is critical to our success.

So if I were to predict where the world is headed, I'd say we can expect AI to do more of our thinking and communicating, and this is not necessarily a bad thing. If we use AI to do the menial parts of our jobs, or personal interactions, we free up time for us to focus on the deeper, more comprehensive side of our minds. To strategise and plan and learn. But we will need to make a conscious decision to spend our freed-up time in that way, because the temptation to slip mindlessly into the dopamine-rich world of TikTok could be all too powerful!

Stay Peaceful

Jay