The signs of times: Choreographing life on TikTok?
This presentation departs from longitudinal research with families (2017-2022), with diverse ways of living and different demographics, touched by the effects of the life course (internal and external factors (Zaman et al., 2016) and globalization (Castro & Ponte, 2021). The families are based in Portugal (n=16) and England (n=2) and as expected were not immune to the signs of these uncertain (deeply mediatized (Hepp & Hasebrink, 2018)) times, which prompted an unprecedented digital immersion of children’s everyday lives with consequences on family dynamics and processes of digital mediation (Castro, 2022). A total of 33 children were eligible for the study (boys (n=19); girls (n=14)). In line with the theme of the symposium, I privilege a child-centric approach, where children are recognised as active agents with digital rights. In the cases I aim to bring to the discussion, children’s first contact with video affordances was introduced by parents and integrated by children into their offline practices of play. But children themselves were the ones who brought TikTok (public) to the family sphere (private) – as digital brokers in control of this social media affordances (despite their age under 13), negotiating actively their digital autonomy and rights and how this has impacted in parents’ reflexive revision of digital mediation. Some topics will organize the talk around children in the short-video culture, namely, i) the display of “doing family” (Morgan, 2015) through carefully choreographed moments, ii) experimentation of different roles; iii) self-display; iv) embodiment of TikTok body language in offline settings.
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