Introduction
Creativity and Culture in Short Video

On 13 April 2021, a video1 was uploaded to the short video platform TikTok in which a pair of hands are shown holding a butcher's knife, a banana, and a cutting board. The video is polished and of professional quality, presenting the aesthetic of a do-it-yourself (DIY) life hack video. The disembodied hands begin to use the massive knife to peel a banana, cutting out large chunks of the fruit with each blade stroke. The song playing in the background is 'Chug Jug with You',2 recorded in late 2018 by YouTuber Leviathan.

After about 15 seconds, just as the disembodied chef presents the boxy, mangled, albeit peeled banana,3 the video abruptly cuts to a young man in a sparse room sitting motionless and expressionless in front of a banana on his desk. Wordlessly, he picks up the banana and peels it with his hands. Without changing his expression, he presents the peeled banana to the camera, gestures to it with his hand (see Figure 0.1), and leans forward to end the recording while shaking his head in disbelief, as if to say, 'are you serious?' The second part of the video appears to be completely unedited and has no music at all. The only sounds that can be heard are the peeling of the banana and the faint voices and noises from the room where the young man is sitting.

Figure 0.1. A 'Stitch' of @khaby.lame demonstrating how to peel a banana in a video shared in April 2021.

The video was created by @Khaby.Lame (Khabane Lame), a Senegalese Italian man, who was 21 at the time. Khaby began posting videos in mid-2020 after losing his job in a factory in Chivasso, a commune in Turin, during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. His early TikTok videos were either silent or in Italian, aimed at local audiences, but upon discovering that his life hack reaction videos could go viral he stopped posting in Italian and kept going with the recipe that seemed to work (Horowitz & Lorenz, 2021).

Life hack videos, where creators demonstrate novel or creative solutions to minor everyday problems, and their parody counterparts, where creators perform a simple task in a ridiculous and impractical manner, portrayed as a life hack, translate well into the short format of TikTok. Unlike videos shared on platforms such as YouTube or Facebook, TikTok videos generally do not include a title that might differentiate between the serious and the silly. Users also encounter videos by scrolling through an endlessly refreshed feed, as opposed to selecting videos to watch from a homepage or menu. Therefore, when users scroll through a new 30-second life hack video, it can be difficult to spot from the start whether it is serious or a parody.

The video is using a TikTok feature called Stitch, which allows users to clip a section of the video they were just watching and to stitch their own content at the end of it, so as to create a new video. Khaby is skilfully using the Stitch feature to create an ironic juxtaposition between the first and the second video - a comedic device frequently used in short-format videos. As the video begins, the viewer is watching what appears to be an earnest life hack for bananas. Moments pass and the viewer starts to wonder: 'Wait. Why are they performing surgery on a banana? Why don't they just peel it?' Right at the point where viewers realize they are being trolled and are about to scroll away, the video cuts to Khaby. As a surrogate for the viewer, Khaby is silent, raw, and dominated by his facial expressions, which speak volumes as to what he thinks about the life hack video. Khaby reflects on his talent and technique simply by noting that 'it's [his] face and [...] expressions which make people laugh' (Horowitz & Lorenz, 2021).

During the three months immediately after being uploaded, Khaby's 30-second banana-peeling video attracted 255 million views and 36 million likes. Khaby continued posting videos by following this successful recipe and, combined, his videos have attracted billions of views and likes and have expanded Khaby's fanbase from basically zero to 70 million in only three months. As of mid-2021, his account is the third most followed account on TikTok, and his globally diverse following outnumbers the population of Italy, millions of users viewing, engaging, and creating their own videos on the basis of his content.

Khaby's simple banana-peeling video is a powerful example of how the short-video format is used to weave a complex tapestry of internet practices and memes and how it encapsulates many of the practices, phenomena, and challenges of creativity and culture that we are exploring in this volume. We will return to Khaby's career in later chapters; but before that we introduce our excursion in the next section by conceptualizing TikTok as a platform. This section discusses what we consider to be a short video trend in digital media culture. We then acknowledge the transformational impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on digital media and the rapid growth of TikTok's user base. Before finishing the chapter by outlining the structure of the book, we discuss the emergent field of TikTok scholarship and four perspectives we employ in our study of creativity and culture in short video.

TikTok as a 'platform'

TikTok can be explored as a product launched and operated by the Chinese company ByteDance, and it can be analysed as a business that generates most of its revenues from advertising. TikTok can also be understood as an app employed by its users to create and share short videos, or as a tool used for entertainment, marketing, or education. In this book, however, we conceptualize and discuss TikTok as a platform.

Platforms are, in a generic sense, online software infrastructure in the form of apps or web interfaces that allow users to share, interact, and develop new forms of use and utility. But the concept of platform also has a rhetorical function. Given the ontological nature of what this concept stands for, the fact that a platform lets actors stand upon it and 'gives leverage, durability, and visibility' (Schwarz, 2017, p. 377), the term 'platform' has been employed by digital companies to promote certain discourses.

As Gillespie (2010) points out, companies strategically refer to their technologies as 'platforms', as a way 'not only to sell, convince, persuade, protect, triumph or condemn, but to make claims about what these technologies are and are not' (p. 359). For example, by describing itself as a 'platform for creative self-expression', a 'global entertainment platform' (TikTok, 2020a, 2020f), TikTok sells the image of a space for joy and creativity to its users and advertisers and at the same time distances itself from the serious allegations it has been facing in some of the markets where it operates (more discussion on TikTok controversies in chapter 6).

To think of TikTok as a platform also requires us to investigate how its technological features, functions, and logic interplay with, and respond to, different social and cultural practices. This process of mutual shaping between digital platforms and entities that deploy the infrastructure can be described as platformization (Helmond, 2015; Van Dijck, Poell, & de Waal, 2018).

As oligopolies are dominated by big technology companies such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon, our sociopolitical life and cultural activities are becoming increasingly dependent on a small number of dominant platforms. In such a 'platform-centred situation', as Jean Burgess (2021, p. 21) described it, platformization serves as a useful theoretical construct to problematize the power of technology companies. An overarching objective of this book is to discuss the implication and problems of TikTok's platformization of creative culture, social activities, and information governance.

One factor that makes TikTok a particularly interesting case for the study of platformization is its unique location in the global platform system. TikTok is not born out of Silicon Valley, as most other international digital media platforms. TikTok has its heritage from China, and the mature short-video industry in the Chinese market has benefited the platform's development overseas. At home, TikTok's mother company ByteDance operates a 'sibling' short-video platform called Douyin, which shares most of its features and functions with TikTok. Douyin's triumphs and struggles at home, as we will discuss throughout this book, have been crucial to the success of TikTok's global development. However, as a response to international suspicion about its Chinese roots, TikTok works hard to distance itself from its Chinese mother company and sibling platform.

In the fast-growing scholarship on platform studies, platformization and platform systems in China have often been discussed as atypical and different from the western norm, due to that country's particular technological and governing conditions.4 For instance, Wang and Lobato (2019) showed that platformization processes in China are distinct from similar processes in other markets and that the difference involves both macro-level factors such as market regulation and micro-level factors such as platforms' affordances. They argued that these distinctive characteristics call for a 'spatialized platform...