"TikTok isn't a hobby": Media(ted) connections, identities, and leisure among contemporary high school-aged youth


Amber-Lee Varadi, York University

In a cultural context where high school-aged youth spend almost as much of their time online as they do sleeping – or participating in any other daily activity – serious debates have emerged regarding the effects of cellphone and social media use on the well-being of today’s young Internet “addicts” (boyd, 2014; Pascoe, 2011; Vaterlaus et al., 2016). The COVID-19 pandemic and corresponding social distancing measures and isolation mandates have sparked further conversations about the role of cellphones and social media in young people’s lives and the ways in which today’s youth create and foster community, friendship, identity cultivation, and fun in leisure contexts. Indeed, the pandemic quickly and intensely diversified the role of cellphones and social media (e.g., Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook, and Twitter) to become more than technological artifacts for social connection alone, but also untameable tools with online affordances that seemingly offer youth boundless opportunities and freedoms to strengthen friendships, learn skills, develop new hobbies, and even “experience a type of beauty or self-expression that would be corporeally unachievable” (Miller and McIntyre, 2023, p. 3625) through the use of “beautifying” face filters that make eyes and lips larger and noses slimmer. These boundless opportunities and freedoms have fuelled and challenged contemporary moral panics surrounding young people’s online engagement and sparked dystopian and utopian ideas about youth’s media consumption (boyd, 2014). Unsurprisingly, these ideas and panics are reproduced across media reports and public conversations that often leave out their very subjects. Accordingly, recent interdisciplinary work of youth scholars and digital sociologists highlights the need to not only spotlight young people’s voices in conversations about their experiences of these technologies, but also draw on youth’s understandings of cellphones and social media to nuance simplistic and homogenous ideas about these technologies (boyd, 2014; Tilleczek and Srigley, 2019). Using preliminary insights on in-progress research, this presentation works to fill these silences by drawing on the narratives of a sample of Ontario-based, high school-aged youth (age 14-18) to consider how young people’s cellphone and related social media use impacts the ways in which they understand their connection to others, self-expression and identity, and leisure engagement. These preliminary findings demonstrate how youth resist shallow understandings of their cellphone use. First, while cellphone and social media engagement can strengthen friendships, online acts of friendship cannot replace offline interactions. At the same time, online events can ruin long-lasting friendships that are irreparable offline. Even more, some youth highlight how the “always online” qualities of some text-based apps make offline interactions feel awkward. Second, and noted across all participants, online acts of self-expression were described as limited and meticulously edited, which counter popular narratives that position youth as reckless over-sharers. Finally, youth framed their media consumption practices (e.g., doom-scrolling, texting, watching videos) in ways that did not align with more romanticized notions of leisure that suggested rest and fun are best achieved without cellphones. This youth-centred work aims to challenge contemporary understandings of young people as either digital natives or digitally naïve, and reinforces that apparently novel forms of online participation are often shaped and regulated by lasting gender norms, heteronormativity, and consumerist ideals.

This paper will be presented at the following session: