And the final speaker in this session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Elena Pilipets, who brings our focus back to TikTok and its glitch aesthetics. The platform is built on templateability and content reuse, but so far our emphasis in understanding glitch aesthetics has been on the visual rather than the sonic aspect.
Sounds are objects of resonance, and on TikTok they resonate across videos through the repetition and reuse that is a key aspect of the platform; but in ‘deep TikTok’ practices such sounds are multiply overlaid until they are no longer individually recognisable.
It becomes difficult to study these glitch aesthetics wth any existing methods, then. The same soundscape does not always make the same meme.
