Powerful Entanglements: Interrelationships Between Platform Architectures and Young People’s Performance of Self in Social Media

Abstract

This chapter explores intertwinements between digital media and communicative and socio-cultural practices as they emerge in relation to contemporary cultures, specifically youth cultures. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are discursive-operative networks within a framework of economic strategies. The chapter’s empirical approach draws on the assumption that young people’s aesthetic practices, transmitted via social media formats, evoke in each instance specific relational modes that preform a space of possible subject positions. The chapter summarises the findings of two selective longitudinal studies examining young people’s practices of self-articulation, consistently interpreted in the context of the specific platform used in each instance. These findings point to the potential of aesthetic-tentative practices as performed by young people to catalyse societal critique.