Despite Reese Witherspoon's Best Dancing, Some of Us Still Don't Understand TikTok

In internet years, I am roughly 2,000 years old. As evidence of my cyber dotage, allow me to offer the fact that I have had a Facebook account as long as Reese Witherspoon’s teenaged son, Deacon, has been alive. So please forgive me when I say that I do not understand what TikTok is.

It is some sort of social media for lip-syncing? Is that correct? At least I can boast Reese Witherspoon as my companion in ignorance. Recently, Witherspoon posted a video of Deacon explaining TikTok on an archaic platform known among the elderly as Instagram. “Basically it’s a like a short-form video platform for like kids, social media,” Deacon told us, to which Reese and I both eagerly nodded, still clueless.

Deacon then helped his mother make her first TikTok video by sheepishly watching her half-step various mom dance moves such as the half-robot and stiff-shouldered knee wiggle while golden oldie “Shoop” plays in the background. Then, in a short video within the short video, Witherspoon held a dog and a water bottle soundtracked by goldener oldie “Mr. Sandman.”

Was that a TikTok? Did we get it? Why am I suddenly in a bathrobe smelling of Ben Gay yelling at social media to get off my lawn?