Virtually Social: A sociocultural approach to collaborative music-making through TikTok Duets

Abstract

Digital content creation platforms have created environments where creative and social processes are deeply intertwined. Collaborative music-making through TikTok Duets exemplifies this convergence: the creative act itself becomes the means through which social relationships are enacted, challenging traditional understandings of online sociality. Limited scholarship exists on asynchronous, collaborative music-making through TikTok Duets (Kaye 2022, 2023; O’Toole 2023), and the social dimensions of TikTok Duets remain largely underexplored in literature. While scholars have long debated what constitutes the social in online interactions (Hall 2018; Jarzyna 2021), these frameworks rely on direct reciprocity as their defining feature. I argue that such frameworks fall short when applied to asynchronous music-making as they overlook how creative processes can themselves constitute meaningful social exchange, even without traditionally reciprocal communication. This study proposes that understanding the social through music on TikTok Duets requires an approach that accounts for the sociality embedded in collaborative creative processes. For this reason, I adopt a sociocultural approach by positioning creativity as the central organizing principle of my analysis, understanding creativity as a relational, distributed, mediated, and meaningful process. This thesis thus explores the research question: how can a sociocultural perspective on TikTok Duets inform our understanding of the “social” in digital, asynchronous, collaborative music-making? Sociocultural approaches see human action as mediated, inseparable from the specific context in which it emerges (Wertsch 1998). Thus, to understand social relationships through Duets, I first analyze how and where these interactions occur. To do so, I apply Vlad Petre Glăveanu’s (2014) theory of distributed creativity to analyze how the interaction unfolds across three planes of distribution and mediation: social through collaboration, material through Duet artifacts and platform environments, and temporal through asynchronous interaction. I apply this sociocultural approach to ShantyTok, a TikTok phenomenon that saw the viral spread of collaborative Duets featuring maritime songs. Through audiovisual analysis based on indexicality (Peirce 1955; Sawyer 2003), I track the collaborative and emergent features of musical performance on Duets and their distributions. Throughout my study, I build a theoretical framework for understanding TikTok Duets as virtually social: framing the virtual in terms of its effectivity (Stanyek and Piekut 2010) rather than its ontology, I argue that these interactions, while materially different than traditional interactions, produce similar, real social effects. Eventually, I argue that the social in TikTok Duets is best understood as: (1) collaborative and emergent; (2) distributed and mediated socially, materially and temporally; (3) negotiated within platformized environments and (4) virtually social in terms of its effectiveness.