Swifttok: A community of creative collaboration
Abstract
TikTok has become a forum for shared experiences, creativity and knowledge that can bring people from all over the world together, to share common interests. Taylor Swift fans are arguably one of the biggest fandoms in the world right now, and with the help of TikTok, they passionately share ideas, theories and encounters to build up hype and enchantment for all things Taylor Swift. This paper explores the way Swifties use TikTok all too well, to collaborate, inspire and unite as a networked public, creating a virtual community that spans the globe. With examples such as links and tags to encourage participation, collaborating to decipher cryptic posts, and inspiring each other with imaginative projects that celebrate being a Taylor Swift fan, I reflect on how TikTok facilitates fans to build a community that says, you belong with me.
Taylor Swift is well known for her enormous community of fans across the globe, who have supported her career enthusiastically and defended her passionately. With the use of social media, and TikTok in particular, this devoted following has been able to grow and connect substantially in many positive ways, becoming a hub of information and creativity. Through TikTok, Taylor Swift fans have been able to produce content that interlinks with other creators, building a collective of different experiences and ideas that contribute to a networked public. This community encourages collaboration and debates to decipher announcements and cryptic clues to predict what might be next on the horizon for Taylor Swift. It inspires creativity and recommendations, giving fans the forum to participate in craft projects, events, make-up looks and even make suggestions for future content of fellow creators and fans. All of which allows fans to bond and contribute to a community and build a powerful connection. Whilst TikTok can also be used as a forum to express dislike of Taylor Swift, poke fun at others or just to witness the hype and avoid fear of missing out, the focus of this paper is to highlight the positive ways Taylor Swift fans use TikTok as a networked public to collaborate, hypothesize and inspire creativity.
There can be no doubt that Taylor Swift fans are some of the most passionate and enthusiastic fandoms in the world, earning themselves their own title, ‘Swifties’. With their ability to sell-out concerts and merchandise, and even crash ticketing websites and search engines across the world, they have shown themselves to be a collective of people who share a common obsession. Digital media has allowed Taylor Swift fans worldwide to connect in many ways, increasing the speed and scope of communication (Jenkins, 2006), just one forum that makes this possible is TikTok. The affordances of TikTok have enabled fans to not only record their personal experiences, but to collaborate, communicate and inspire each other in creative ways. Whether it be collective associations to sad songs, brutal ballads or happy bops, it is clear that Taylor Swift’s music has touched the hearts of many, enabling them to experience strong emotional connections and a fierce loyalty that inspires them to remain highly active in their content creation (Ryan Bengtsson and Edlom, 2023). One way they distribute this experience and emotion is through the use of hashtags on their posts. With hashtags such as #swifttok, #swiftie, #taylorswift and #theerastour just to name a few, fans have been able to generate a participatory culture, by working together to categorise their posts, search for similar content and connect with fellow supporters. This collective of identities, memories and experiences enhances creative conversations to build a bigger web of shared information and expand their reach (Delwiche and Henderson, 2012). When Taylor Swift releases new music, she often includes hashtags of song titles in her posts, which fans then use in their own content. This can allow fans to create their own videos with their own thoughts and opinions, but with use of hashtags, they are able to interlink with other creators and content to build a large collective of material to inspire collaboration (Ryan Bengtsson and Edlom, 2023). Swifties can share their concert clips, dance trends, transitions or reactions to announcements and new music, generating engagement and collaboration of fans who are participating alongside the narrative of the music (Chapman, 2022). Whilst some hashtags are not always used to interlink content and can instead be used for ‘hijacking’ to get unrelated content seen, the ways in which Taylor Swift fans use hashtags can be very successful for connecting with the wider Swiftie community to share ideas and information. Hashtags aren’t the only way Taylor Swift fans connect with each other using TikTok, they can also share, add comments or tag videos to engage and work with fellow creators.
Swifties extend their audience by tagging @TaylorSwift, @TaylorNation or even fellow creators and friends, to ensure other people who share the same interest can see the content. In doing so Swifties have built a virtual community in which they can share similar experiences, debate feelings or interpretations and even inspire ideas for future content (Chapman, 2022). Delanty (2018) describes virtual communities as a forum to share information and participate in social interaction generally. But Swifties don’t simply connect with others in their local area, the capabilities of TikTok have allowed people to connect all over the world, reducing the challenges of space and geographic location and completely changing the structure of community (Hampton, 2016). Whilst being part of the Swiftie community can often be considerable imagined, or “imaginary in that it does not exist outside the virtual reality” (Delanty, 2018), Swifttok has also allowed fans of Taylor Swift to connect in person and “like any subculture, they’ve established their own set of rules, languages and behaviors” (Kingsberry, 2023). Swifties often collaborate by arranging things such as travelling together, camping out in long lines together, dressing in costumes, sharing theories, creating memes and trends, investigating rumors, attending events and even arranging to swap bracelets at concerts. With the use of TikTok, the virtual community can sometimes evolve into a physical community in which people can connect in person. Although this community is mostly virtual in nature, the comradery and passion of the fans is so strong and abundant, “they fiercely defend each other and their idol. They trade stories, memories and gifts” (Kingsberry, 2023). With this collective of people from many different backgrounds, when something new is announced or teased, TikTok provides an ample forum for collaboration when it comes to interpreting clues and trying to determine what is around the corner.
What if I told you, she’s a mastermind?
Taylor Swift is well known for her ability to hide cryptic clues or ‘Easter-eggs’ in her posts, songs, and videos, to tease new music or big announcements, giving her a mastermind identity (Kingsberry, 2023). With their passion and excitement for anything Taylor Swift, fans always rise to the occasion when it comes to dismantling these signs and symbols, and TikTok gives them the perfect forum to post their own interpretations and theories. Fans have created millions of TikTok videos deciphering the meaning of posts created by not only Taylor Swift herself, but her friends and colleagues. By searching for trinkets, captions, numbers, dates, images, gestures and even wardrobe choices to interpret what they think is coming and when it could be announced or released. This tactic not only encourages fans to stay engaged and feel like part of the process, but also enables Taylor Swift to create some form of distraction from her personal life and maintain some form of privacy, when the focus is on her work (Paúl, 2024). With the use of TikTok, followers can share their findings, make assumptions and debate with fellow fans who may have different opinions or have spotted different clues. By tagging, sharing and commenting on each other’s posts, Swifties have constructed a collective intelligence that enables them to interpret and analyse posts from many different perspectives. When these theories end up being correct, they celebrate together and share in the excitement of the announcement, but when their theories turn out to be farfetched or completely off-track, they still collaborate and evaluate what they may have missed together, in a process sometimes referred to as ‘clowning’. Whilst TikTok posts of this nature can sometimes lead to some wild theories or the creation of unhinged content just formed for views, for most, the aim of these TikToks is to collaborate with like-minded people and share in the excitement of what is to come. An example of this is the speculation surrounding the release of her re-recorded ‘Reputation (Taylor’s Version)’ album.
For months Swifties have analysed the smallest of clues on social media, including finger placement in a coffee cup post, a glitch and error message on the Taylor Swift website, black and white profile picture changes from not only Taylor but her friends, dancers and backup singers, outfits splashed with the green or snake motifs and even numbers that lead them down a path to the ‘Reputation’ era, so when the Grammys came around and Taylor Swift announced a whole new album instead, Swiftie’s were completely taken by surprise (Paúl, 2024). Fans posted TikToks of their bamboozled reactions to the announcement of the new ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ album, they reevaluated their previous theories, reinterpreted clues and began to speculate what the new album would contain. TikToks created by Taylor Swift fans use can therefore be seen as a great example of an online fan community that utilises “expansive self-organizing groups focused around the collective production, debate, and circulation of meanings, interpretations, and fantasies in response to various artifacts of contemporary popular culture” (Jenkins, 2006, p.138). It has not only allowed followers to share in the excitement of new media but has created such a hype around the new album and given fans the opportunity to build up excitement together and further hypothesize in the lead up to the album’s release. Decoding clues to predict future releases and announcements is not the only way Swifties use TikTok to build publicity and show enthusiasm, they have also used it as a forum for shared creativity, particularly in the lead up to The Eras Tour concert.
So make the friendship bracelets
When Taylor Swift announced her highly anticipated sixth concert tour, fans around the world began planning before the tickets even went on sale. With such excitement surrounding her first tour since 2018, “social media, particularly TikTok, has put the Eras Tour in front of the eyes of everyone sitting at home” (Benson, 2023). When tickets were finally released, they were so highly in demand that massive ticketing websites around the world including Ticketek and Ticketmaster crashed, and along with it came many TikTok’s of fans from all over the world sharing their excitement and heartbreak as they tried to secure tickets. But the battle for tickets was not the end of The Eras Tour content produced by fans, TikTok became a hub of creativity and inspiration as people prepared to attend or relish in the atmosphere of it all. Many trends have come out of TikTok content surrounding The Eras Tour, and one of those is making and trading friendship bracelets. Based on one throwaway line from ‘You’re on your own kid’, that went “so make the friendship bracelets, take the moment and taste it” (Taylor Swift, 2022), fans all over the world took it as a call to action and began a craft frenzy in preparation for the concert. Fans posted tutorial videos on how to make friendship bracelets, collaborated with each other to provide ideas or suggestions and organised to meet up with each other to trade bracelets not only at the concert itself, but at other Taylor themed events and merch lines in the lead up to the concert. This trend made news headlines in Australia, with reports that bead sections in major craft stores had begun to sell out of products in the lead up to the Australian leg of The Eras Tour (Davies, Litjens, McGlaughlin, Cornish and Allison, 2024). Sharing inspiration for friendship bracelets was not the only project that sparked Swiftie collaboration and shared creativity, outfits for the concert also became a topic for TikTok posts.
Fans took the opportunity to embrace the atmosphere and be creative when planning their concert wardrobe and make-up looks, spending hours meticulously collecting and crafting outfits and supplies based on songs, eras or even in-jokes, often documenting the process as they went along (Benson, 2023). People shared their project successes and disasters, sought advice for ideas, improvements, outfit options and even product recommendations, allowing TikTok to become a forum of sharing skills, knowledge and creativity. The Eras Tour gave fans the opportunity to be imaginative with their concert attire, taking inspiration from Taylor Swift’s costumes of “bedazzled power suits and ballgowns to embellished bodysuits and T-shirts, each look conceptualizes the feeling of its era through its silhouette, colours, and materials, with some even paying homage to her specific past tour looks” (Davoli, 2023). Fans took the opportunity to create bold make-up looks, often sharing tutorial videos and interacting with followers for advice, suggestions for future content and recommendations of products or techniques. When the concert finally came around, content became about sharing ideas for outfit transitions, where people would transform into their Swiftie attire in creative ways. Interconnecting with each other, Swifties were able to take inspiration from others and recreate transitions, generate tutorial videos or adapt videos to produce new content ideas. With the means available, fans were able to use TikTok to unite and build a community of creative minds that reveled in the enchantment of it all.
Social media has enabled many online communities to connect and distribute information without the constraints of geographic location, just one example of this is Taylor Swift fans. With forums such as TikTok, followers from all over the world have come together to share ideas, interests and experiences that contribute to a diverse collection of interlinked content. For Swifties, collective knowledge and interpretation has built up hype and excitement for upcoming announcements for new music, videos or re-recordings, as people contribute to decoding Easter eggs and clues in posts by Taylor Swift and her squad. It has enabled the growth of enthusiasm for Taylor Swift’s highly anticipated Eras Tour, allowing fans to share creative ideas for costumes, make-up looks, transition trends and friendship bracelets. TikTok encourages participation and engagement between fans who share skills, recommendations and overall passion for all things Taylor Swift.
References
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