The Practice: Short-Form Video Creation on TikTok

One of the most significant contemporary social practices to emerge in recent years is the creation and consumption of short-form video content on TikTok. What began as a lip-syncing and dance platform has evolved into a richly layered communicative ecosystem used by hundreds of millions of people daily — not only as passive consumers, but as active producers of meaning. Users create short videos (ranging from 15 seconds to 10 minutes) that blend spoken word, music, text overlays, visual effects, body language, trending sounds, and algorithmic tagging into coherent, culturally resonant messages. This practice extends beyond entertainment; people use TikTok to share medical advice, political commentary, educational content, professional tips, and community support.

Communicative Features

TikTok content is fundamentally multimodal. Drawing on Kress and van Leeuwen's framework, meaning-making in this space is never reducible to a single mode. A single TikTok video simultaneously deploys the linguistic mode (captions, voiceover, spoken dialogue), the visual mode (camera angle, facial expression, setting, physical gesture), the audio mode (trending sounds, original music, background noise), and the spatial mode (on-screen text placement, transitions, cuts). Creators must orchestrate these modes with deliberate skill, selecting which combination best conveys their intended meaning for a particular audience.

Beyond multimodality, TikTok embeds highly context-dependent communication. Successful creators must demonstrate fluency in platform-specific cultural codes: recognising trending audio clips, understanding meme formats, engaging with comment communities, and timing content to algorithmic patterns. The "stitch" and "duet" features introduce intertextual and dialogic dimensions, enabling creators to directly respond to, remix, or challenge existing content — a form of networked conversation that mirrors traditional spoken dialogue but occurs asynchronously and at scale. Communication on TikTok is also deeply participatory; the algorithm rewards engagement, incentivising content that invites viewers to comment, share, or recreate rather than simply view.

Implications for Literacies Pedagogy

TikTok culture raises urgent questions for educators working within a New Literacies or multiliteracies framework. First, it challenges the primacy of print-based literacy as the dominant mode of communication and assessment. If students are producing sophisticated, audience-aware, multimodal texts every day outside school walls, then classrooms that privilege only alphabetic writing risk creating a profound disconnect between students' out-of-school literacy lives and their formal learning experiences. As Cope and Kalantzis argue, a pedagogy of multiliteracies must take seriously the full range of meaning-making resources available to learners.

Second, TikTok literacy demands critical media literacy as a pedagogical priority. Because the platform is driven by a proprietary and opaque recommendation algorithm, students need scaffolding to understand how content is curated, amplified, or suppressed — and why. Questions of power, representation, disinformation, and datafication are embedded in the practice itself. Educators can use TikTok as a rich text for analysing how ideological messages are naturalised within seemingly innocuous entertainment formats.

Third, TikTok invites a rethinking of authorship, audience, and purpose in writing pedagogy. Traditional composition instruction tends to construct writing as a solitary, linear process with a single imagined reader. TikTok creators, by contrast, are constantly negotiating real, responsive, and often anonymous audiences whose feedback is immediate and quantifiable. Incorporating video composition, multimodal storytelling, or even platform critique into the curriculum would not only honour students' existing competencies but also develop transferable skills in design, rhetoric, and digital citizenship. The challenge for literacy educators is to build bridges between the rich semiotic work students already perform and the analytical, critical frameworks that formal education can uniquely provide.

Contemporary Social Practice Update TikTok as a Site of New Literacy Practice