TikTok’s misuse of POV shows an identity crisis for Gen Z

By Caleb Holm

You might be on TikTok, but hopefully you’re not. However, even if you are part of the few fighting the herd, you likely still see Tiktok videos as they ooze out and infect other social media platforms. A recent development on the Chinese-owned media site struck me as odd: the misuse of the term POV.

One of the most popular video styles on Tiktok has been the “POV” (point of view), but Tiktok by no means invented it. We’ve seen it in novels like Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” (1847), films such as

“The Blair Witch Project” (1999), and—in the age of short form media—it has appeared again. In POV content, the stories are told in the first person: Jane Eyre narrates her own life; we view the horror of the film students through the lens of their own camera. It has always been understood that the “point of view” is that of the narrator or creator.

But the world has changed a lot in the past few years. As social media consumes more and more of our time and the users become younger and younger, our interactions evolve. It’s survival of the fittest. We’ve been trained that in order to remain safe from the mob (and seduce the masses), we have to present ourselves in just the right way. To a young millennial marketing executive in the early 2010s this was simply a new tool; to the generation that grew up online, we picked up an MBA while huddled around an iPod touch at recess. The problem isn’t the skill per se, but rather the product we sold: ourselves. We have learned to market ourselves so well that now major businesses reach out to these precocious protogees for advice, asking for brand deals. Gen Z has