Tik Tok and generation Z

Some months ago, during a rehearsal break, a teenage girl told me that her ‘favourite dancer ever’ was Charli D’Amelio. Ignorant as to who Charli D Amelio was, I started an investigation and soon discovered that Charli is a sixteen-yearold American girl, who, with her 15-30 seconds performances (most of them entirely choreographed and showed only from the hips up), has attracted 80 million followers worldwide, becoming the most followed person on Tik Tok. Honestly, my first reaction was a mix of astonishment, outrage and curiosity. However, when this same girl confessed to me that she had started taking dance classes precisely so as to improve her Tik Tok performances, I realized that it was the moment to overcome my instinctive outrage and take Tik Tok seriously, studying it from a scientific perspective and with scholarly rigour. As Anderson (2020) notices, in today’s swiftly moving social media app landscape, it can be challenging to determine which apps will be around by the time they have been written about. Tik Tok’s recent impressive increase (mainly during the lockdown) and its current 800 million active users seem to suggest that the app is here to stay; in any case, the platform deserves attentive observation a priori, because it represents the mirror of a generation, Generation Z. Since Generation Z will soon represent more than one-third of the world’s population, it is seminal to understand, or at least get acquainted, with their habitat and with their habits.