With social media networks coming and going over the years, it is no surprise that Gen Z has a new obsession named TikTok. 

Society and the interests of the general public are ever-changing aspects of the modern world. The world has seen a drastic change since phones were first introduced and now people can do millions of things with a single device. 

“Things were slow, and the computers were huge, and you wouldn’t have social media. You wouldn’t have used it then,” former digital communications teacher, Keri Lejune said. 

Friendster, founded in 2002, is considered the first real form of social media that the public had access to and was used to connect people globally. MySpace arrived in 2003, and Facebook in 2004. 

“Facebook has really been the social media app that has pushed society to use social media more and more frequently,” said Lejune. 

Facebook is widely considered a pioneer in the modern world of social media and has allowed over 1 billion users worldwide to use its servers. 

“I know kids don’t use Facebook,” Lejune said.”They use other apps, but most adults use Facebook and Twitter, but for the youth, Instagram, Snapchat and now TikTok. The youth have all grown up using social media.” 

Tiktok, with more than 500 million users, has become the latest obsession in popular media. 

“I think TikTok gives people the opportunity to express their feelings through videos,” said Ethan Druck, a junior who has over forty thousand followers on Tiktok and featured on CNN. ”Like Vine, it’s a new way for people to express their feelings, whether they may be positive or negative,” 

Many have started questioning whether the hype will last like Twitter and Facebook or eventually die down like Vine, a social media app that was also catered exclusively to videos but later shut down due to financial hardships with Twitter and the dwindling traffic it was receiving. 

“I think [TikTok] is in the process of getting to that point. It’s still growing more, and I think it’s going to reach its peak here pretty soon,” Druck said. “I think it’ll possibly have a greater impact because Vine was very short videos, and you’re being given the opportunity to make longer videos.”

With the popularity of TikTok boosting day by day, and with more than 1 billion videos viewed per day there’s no telling what the media platform has in store for.

“The start of TikTok’s popularity is just beginning,” Druck said. “ It’s cool to imagine how big it’ll get even in the next year.”