Hierarchies of Knowledge: Usage of a Chinese Media App in Rural Tamil Nadu

• In Event: The (Un)Promise of Enterprise 3.0: Data Mining, Data Analytics and Market Innovations in the Global South

Abstract

"I like to see my friends acting". This is how a young woman in a village near Tamil Nadu in India describes her fascination with TikTok. TikTok is a media app for creating and sharing short videos. The media App has been developed by the Chinese internet based Company ByteDance and is one of the most successful ones in India (by Januar 2019). The usage of machine learning and tracking of behavioral pattern and users’ like-dislike makes it possible for TikTok to easily adapt to different cultural contexts. In addition, privacy and security in the online world is generally not a topic of interest in rural India - neither at school nor at home. Therefore, young people show their faces, their friends and share their location on TikTok. This gives ByteDance opportunity to evaluate data of millions predominantly minor users in the name of innovations. In my paper presentation, I want to talk about the hierarchy of knowledge between companies like ByteDance and and its users and the lack of local societal strategies to close this gap. My presentation is structured as follows. First, I will give a brief introduction on the rise of Chinese AI companies and ByteDance in particular. The second part will show how young people use TikTok and how teachers, parents and NGOs fail to guide and inform them on future risks. These insights are based on several month of anthropological fieldwork in a village near Kanchipuram in Tamil Nadu.

Author

• Susanne Ebner, University of Cologne