Thin Talk with TikTok: Portraying the Influence of TikTok Trends on the Body Image Perceptions of the Female Senior High School Students of De La Salle University Integrated School Through an Interactive Sculpture

• Main Author: Quiazon, Portia Beatrice L.
• Format: text
• Published: Animo Repository 2022
• Subjects: female body image; TikTok; social media; pandemic; sculpture; Arts and Humanities
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/conf_shsrescon/2022/arts_va/1; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1004&context=conf_shsrescon
• Institution: De La Salle University

The pandemic has caused a rise of fitness-related videos to go trending on TikTok, which is currently one of the most-used apps in the Philippines. Adding to this the prolonged screen time because of quarantine and being extra conscious of physical appearances in online communication setups, this influences the body image perceptions of teenage women. The study aims to determine whether TikTok is positively or negatively influencing teenage women’s body image perception through qualitative surveys with the female senior high school students of De La Salle University Integrated School. The collected data revealed that TikTok’s influence is a mix of positive and negative and heavily relied on their initial viewpoint and self-awareness of their body image. This leads to the creation of a reflective cubist sculpture made of adhesive mirrors, stacked boxes shaped into a figure of a woman, and copper wires. As viewers go around the sculpture, they see themselves from different perspectives. The sculpture aims to convey how the media teenage women see on TikTok and what they take from it is a complete reflection of how they think and see themselves. Negative self-talk will lead to negative perceptions no matter how positive the content may be and vice versa. Isolation during quarantine has given a lot of time for self-reflection. This entails the importance of discovering self-awareness when it comes to how people interact and engage with the media they surround themselves with in terms of whether it benefits their self-perception or not.