De Bijdrage van TikTok aan Socialisatie en Subjectificatie bij Adolescenten

Abstract

Current research is mostly negative about social media. but it could teach skills that adolescents do not acquire in school. Therefore we seek to answer the question: ‘How does TikTok contribute to socialization and subjectification among adolescent creators and users within the digital learning community?’ The research sample are adolescents aged 18 till 22 years. The interviews were done online through Microsoft Teams video calls. First, the results show that TikTok could contribute to the socialization of the participants by stimulating social contacts, the possibility to post videos and comments, by using videos to motivate them to do something independently and by the general rules and atmosphere of acceptance. Second, TikTok can contribute to the subjectification of the participants through interaction with creators and users, the swipe function, by making participants aware of what a creator can and cannot post and because creators can share their positivity and honesty and are given the space to distinguish themselves from others. However, there are also parts of socialization and subjectification that TikTok does not contribute to. The limitations of this study include that we ended up interviewing only ten female participants. Moreover, we did not measure how formal education contributes to the socialization and subjectification of the participants. For follow-up research, we therefore recommend to include more experiences from both men and women. Furthermore, it is interesting to examine the contribution of formal education to both socialization and subjectification and to compare it with the contribution of TikTok.