The Kids Are Onto Something: TikTok as Meso-Archive

Abstract: While the field of theatre and performance studies has understood for some time that digital memory repositories have shifted the ways scholars engage with and analyze performance, there has been no consensus about what we should call these repositories, and how specifically they might be treated as serious collections of performance memory. This essay proposes the term meso-archive and suggests that digital meso-archives can and should be examined using similar methods to more traditional archival spaces. I use TikTok, currently the most popular social media app worldwide, as a case study to show how meso-archives enact and expand traditional archival paradigms.