Digital platforms - TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Spotify, etc - are often perceived as disruptive forces in their capacity to concentrate and market flows of audience attention. This project sets out to understand how, in practical and material terms, digital platforms engage in the construction of this audience commodity. Through computational analyses of promotional sales materials and related documents by these major platforms, the project aims to outline how the value of audience attention is constructed, and how emerging shifts towards an engagement economy start to replace the emphasis on attention as prime commodity in these markets. So far, the project finds that major platforms respond to a credibility and impact verification crisis in online advertising markets by drawing on establish valuation mechansims such as third-party market research vendors. Likewise, early findings indicate that platforms are bound in a dynamic tension to established consumer markets, adopting to rather than disrupting their economic logics.

Modern and highly industrialised societies have long seen consumption become a key mechanism to construct identity, articulate values, and establish a sense of belonging. Commercial public spaces such as malls have become critical sites to this consumer cultural complex. In this ongoing, long-term ethnographic project, I investigate how spaces of consumption articulate these dynamics in the context of contemporary Japanese society. Situated in the Central Japan region, the project takes commercial public and transit spaces such as shopping steets, malls, and department stores as field sites. It analyses these sites' visual and material culture, seeking to outline the logics of valuation, worth, and public attention represented in them. By doing so, the project outlines how spaces of consumption shape identity formation today and how forms of dis/connected sociability organise rhythms of daily life in contemporary Japan.

(with Chunmeizi Su, Jina Yoon, Hui Lin)

Billions of people around the world engage with video games as a form of leisure. For many of them, online games in particular have become vital sites of social interaction and belonging. Like other forms of such "social media", online gaming is a site where data-driven systems and algorithms are used to facilitate online social interactions. The "Trust in Gaming" project investigates the landscape of data-driven systems that govern online gamers experiences. Through a mixed-methods approach of analysing the political economy of gaming platforms and different controversies in gaming communities, the project outlines how trust in these systems is negotiated, and what can be learned for and from gaming about creating fairer, safer, and more equitable online social spaces. In particular, the initial findings of this ongonig project provide a contextualisation of the gamer data subject along its relations, and tensions with platforms, in regards to practices of consent management, moderation, personalisation, and advertising data practices.

(with Yingwen Wang and Hui Lin)

Algorithms have become key systems that programme social relations online. In return, the figure of "the algorithm" is a percevied interaction partner for many users of social media sites and apps. This small collaborative project aimed to better understand what new kinds of socialities emerge in this conjuncture. Through a comparative analysis of young TikTok users in the United Kingdom, and old Douyin users in China, the project critically examined the role of cultural and life course backgrounds in shaping algorithmic socialities. The analysis found that users in both contxts have similar algorithmic experiences, such as coming across serendipitous connections through platform algorithms. At the same time, the meaning and social interaction produced from that experience signficantly varied by user context, suggseting a limited impact of platforms and algorithms on changing underlying value systems and social norms.

(with Yiting Wang)

Social media platforms follow an increasingly content-centric design. On apps like TikTok or Instagram, it is content and content feeds that form the primiary site of engagement and user interaction. Debates have surfaced concerns with such a content-centric design logic, having potentially negative effects on the social quality of social media. Drawing on over one year of digital fieldwork on Instagram, the "Atmosphers of sociability" project looked at how social significance is articulated in short-video formats. Specificlly, the project analysed over 800 videos created for the purpose of shraing them with others as artifacts of Instagram Reels as a content-centric social media. Within these artifacts, the project revealed a playful and creative language through which people today articulate social realtionships online, not through durable social network dynamics, yet through ephemeral content and practices such as sharing videos and memes. In this way, the project argued that the social quality of social media is not fading but materilising in new form, an atmospheric one.

Every day, millions of people take out their phones, open apps such as TikTok, and start scrolling. They watch videos, ‘like’ them, leave or read comments, and occasionally share the content they discover with others. A lot is being said about scrollers in debates. Yet, their stories, voices, and lived experiences rarely stand in the foreground. Without these millions consuming content on a daily basis, digital platforms like TikTok would not exist. Their popularity and commercial viability rest on continuous consumption, meaning, the formation of an audience attracting creators and advertisers alike. In my dissertation project, I took TikTok as a case and investigated it from an audience studies perspective. I ethnographically entered the world of scrollers in an attempt to unpack what it means to consume content online.

To do so, collected over one and a half years of fieldwork. During this period, the TikTok consumption of 30 young adults based in the United Kingdom was studied using methods such as interviews, media mapping techniques, participant observations, and digital fieldwork. Through the collected data, an ethnographically situated account of online content consumption was developed. This account outlines how scrollers engage with the TikTok “For You” page as an everyday technology and resource generative of pleasure, relaxation, stimulation, inspiration, and social connection. It discusses how scrollers navigate TikTok as a commercial online space and the challenges they experience in that process. In that course, the project confronted concerns about the addictive design of apps like TikTok and the growing personalisation of media environments.

Participants were found to appropriate TikTok in creative ways as an escape site to manage their degrees of social connectedness. TikTok enabled them to momentarily disconnect and withdraw from social pressures or obligations. Simultaneously, the app provided a resource for meaningful reconnection through sharing content. Using TikTok was not unproblematic, however. Participants got carried away scrolling, and in response to that actively developed tactics to break the endless flow of the “For You” page. Likewise, they negotiated concerns about TikTok’s surveillance practices in a way that rendered their relationship with the app tense and fragile. Their trust in TikTok was conditional and continuously put to the test. Unravelling these dynamics of online content consumption, my thesis contributed to our understanding of social media like TikTok, digital everyday life, and their politics.