On April 28, she filmed herself mimicking the dance moves from the Wii video game Michael Jackson: The Experience. That winking, subversive humor is on display in the very first video that made Haley TikTok famous. It wasn’t until my fourth day in Huntsville that I found out it was a joke. Her constant deadpan gives the sense that everything she says isn’t totally serious, but you can never quite be sure.Īn example: She recently made a solemn-seeming TikTok in which she revealed that a couple of people she used to be friends with were trying to damage her reputation by outing her, and so she was just going to go ahead and tell the truth, that yes, she’s a scientologist. She is the owner of what she calls a “resting angry face” that she uses to humorous effect in her TikToks, which are at once joyous and surreal, and filtered through several layers of irony. She is shy and darkly funny and has a habit of sitting with one leg pulled to her chest as if to fold herself away. In person she’s tall and lanky, with a long heap of light brown hair behind her, a three-sizes-too-big T-shirt, and clunky white sneakers on her feet, which makes her sound like a geek in an ’80s movie but really means she’s a 2019 cool girl. I first meet Haley over fried chicken at an upscale restaurant in downtown Huntsville. Haley has gotten a small taste of this, and like everybody else who has, she wants more. They don’t want a boring day job, because who does? Why would you choose to eat sad desk salads when you could meet screaming fans and get paid by brands just for being yourself? Haley and her friends, and their friends, and their friends, want to be stars in the constellation of professionally watchable influencers who rack up millions of views and considerable livelihoods by simply hanging out on their couch. To be a very online young person in 2019 is to share the same goal: have the kind of social media following wherein performing your life online becomes a paying job. Haley is on her way to getting the thing she wants, the thing all of her friends want. Haley said “Yeah” and handed her her ice cream, and the girl said “Okay, thanks.” Now she has a journalist who flew all the way to Alabama from New York to find out what it’s like to be her. Another time a girl came up to her at the snack shack at the pool where she lifeguards and asked if she was that girl from TikTok. But this summer Haley got recognized at dance camp, twice. On TikTok, where followers are amassed at warp speed, it doesn’t even put Haley close to the top 50 accounts, which all boast followers into the multiple millions, despite most adults having zero clue who any of these people making silly, seconds-long videos are. No, 100,000 followers is not a million followers. After that, the hits came easier, and today she has just over 100,000 followers. A few weeks later, she made a video about celebrities who look like her and that went viral, too. Back in April, under the username - Karen is her middle name “yodeling” references an old meme page she used to follow, but she’s since changed it to - Haley uploaded a video of herself dancing that went viral. These people, most visibly teenagers, have found huge audiences on the nascent app known for short video posts, and Haley is one of them. Over the past year, another group have entered this category: TikTok stars. “A little bit famous” is the domain of Instagram influencers, reality TV contestants, YouTube creators, pageant queens, and mid-roster athletes who you yourself might not recognize on the street, but someone would. This is true for more people right now than ever before in the history of the world, but when you are a 16-year-old in Huntsville, Alabama, it is a very big deal.īeing a little bit famous is different from being famous-famous, but it is not that different, because when you’re a little bit famous it still feels like you are the center of the world.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |