Irene Costera Meijer: TikTok as a case study to understand the layeredness of Media Experience:

Join our next Lunch Meeting with Irene Costera Meijer, Professor of Journalism Studies and head of the Journalism Studies section at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

She is also Work Package I Advisor and Key Researcher. Her research interests focus on audience studies and in particular on the impact of digitalization on changing practices of media consumption, media experiences and news use. When doing research she often collaborates with media organisations.  

Where and When?

At MediaFutures, 29.september at 12:00

Abstract:

TikTok reaches around 44% of the 18-24 age group, with 20% explicitly saying they use it for news (Newman et al., 2023). It is not surprising, then, that (news) media have migrated to TikTok to engage with younger audiences. Yet, research shows that media struggle with reaching young people, because conventional formats do not always correspond with how young people use and experience social media platforms. Nordic researchers have argued that newsrooms would benefit from a platform-specific content approach: beyond merely (re)”packaging” the news and neglecting the content, they must learn to “speak the code of TikTok” to engage young audiences with their news.

We took a different non-news centric approach by analyzing how 99 young people (16 – 24) experience TikTok and whether there might be room for news in this experience. Experience may highlight positionality, temporality, embodiment, ambivalence and interaction (Costera Meijer & Groot Kormelink, 2021; Ytre-Arne et al., 2023). This approach allowed us to get insight into the RELATIVE value of news within their TikTok-experiences.

In my presentation I will show how the dimension of temporality – the discrepancy between love = ‘concurrent enjoyment’ and hate = ‘retrospective regret’ may offer valuable insights for public service media and news media to stand out on TikTok and be meaningful to a young audience.