Ben Tylecote

The new age of fame ǀ the power of the individuals TikTok – you’ve probably heard of it by now. If you haven’t then know your children or grandchildren almost certainly have. In the last few decades social media has evolved rapidly: from myspace to Facebook to Instagram and snapchat, Tiktok appears to be the next phase in that evolution. With 800m active users and a company valuation of over 100 billion dollars, the app by technology behemoth ByteDance is seemingly unstoppable, you wouldn’t be stupid to believe that this rocket ship is bound for the stars. Therefore, it might be surprising to hear that over the course of just a few days the application went from an average review score of 4.5/5 down to just 1 star in India. Who on earth has the power to change the course of such a huge company? That is the question many people were wondering. As it turns out this was all sparked by a feud between two popular Indian creators, a tiktoker and a youtuber. India today explained ...

How common do you think it is that someone less skilled gets the job, or someone less talented wins the competition? For me I realised just how readily this happens in the summer break last year.  It was a sailing national championship, I won’t bore you with details. All you need to know is that I’m a good competitive sailor who is defiantly better than my brother. Ha. This competition is set to last two days, its windy and I’m fit, feeling good. The first race goes, and I capsize after being in the top 5 and end up finishing dead last. It’s fine, I say to myself,  your going to do way better than that in the next races.  Long story short that day went terribly, after that I don’t think I got a single other top ten result. What’s funny is this isn’t the first time this happened – and if I hadn’t figured out what I’m about to tell you it certainly wouldn’t have been the last. What happened on the second day was that I used the technique I'm about to tell yo...