Italian Sociological Review

Cultural Consumption in the Age of TikTok. Algorithmic Infrastructures and Popular Practices

Adam Arvidsson — 2026-05-12

In recent years platforms and their algorithms have taken on a more intense function in structuring tastes and desires across many fields: at the same time, their growing diffusion and importance has greatly extended the scope of platformization, making platforms relevant to a much wider range of actors and activities. In this special issue we want to explore how these two novel features – intrinsic not just to TikTok, but increasingly to the novel ‘tiktokized’ digital environment overall – play out across platform cultures. The papers address the growing importance of platforms as infrastructures of cultural and social life, and their resulting prevalence as mediators of a wider variety of activities on the part of a greater diversity of actors.

Post-Digital Data-Gathering and the Adaptive Epistemological Framework: Navigating the Human-Algorithm-Platform Nexus

Giuseppe Michele Padricelli — 2026-05-12

In the post-digital condition, where the digital is no longer a separate domain but the pervasive environment of social life, this article addresses the methodological and epistemological challenges of studying human-algorithm-platform interactions. Digital platforms are understood as socio-technical systems that mediate user behavior through opaque algorithmic mechanisms, producing data as co-constructed artifacts rather than neutral traces. The paper proposes an adaptive epistemological framework that responds to digital data’s hybrid and processual nature, emphasizing the need for flexible, plural, and reflexive research designs. The work conceptualizes data hybridization as a methodological paradigm capable of capturing active engagement and passive traces through a comparative analysis of digital and computational ethnography, web scraping, APIs, and data donation. The discussion culminates in a typological framework that systematizes data-gathering techniques according to user awareness and researcher intervention, offering practical and theoretical guidance for navigating an increasingly algorithmic and datafied research landscape.

Young People and Digital Consumption: Profiles and Empirical Pathways in the Algorithmic Age

Domenico Trezza — 2026-05-12

This paper offers an integrated perspective on youth digital consumption by examining how access, usage patterns, digital skills, and algorithmic awareness intersect to shape differentiated experiences on YouTube and TikTok. Anchored in a theoretical framework that views digital consumption as a space where access, competence, and critical reflexivity toward algorithmic processes converge, the research draws on a sample of 449 young adults residing in Campania and Lombardy. Using quantitative multi-analitycal strategy — including typological modeling, multiple correspondence analysis, and structural equation modeling — the study investigates how usage intensity, digital skills, and algorithmic awareness generate unequal configurations of epistemic agency. Findings indicate that frequent platform use alone does not ensure critical engagement; rather, the quality of digital competencies emerges as the key driver in fostering algorithmic awareness. By identifying eight distinct digital profiles, the study contributes also to mapping emerging forms of social stratification within the algorithmically shaped digital environment.

Between Platforms and Habits: A Qualitative Study of Cultural Consumption in the Digital Age

Noemi Crescentini — 2026-05-12

This article explores the transformations of cultural consumption practices in the era of platformisation, analysing the role of algorithmic recommendation systems in shaping users’ cultural repertoires, emotions and identity trajectories. The present contribution is situated within the theoretical framework of Science and Technology Studies and is based on a qualitative survey conducted through elicitive interviews with a sample of 50 Users in Italy. The results demonstrate how platforms such as YouTube and TikTok mediate everyday cultural consumption through distinct logics: YouTube is configured as a space for reflective and in-depth consumption, while TikTok favours practices of rapid emotional engagement and continuous immersion. The text discusses the tensions between situated agency, pragmatic adaptation and forms of resignation, highlighting how users oscillate between attempts at reappropriation and passive acceptance of algorithmic dynamics. Furthermore, the study documents how platforms do not merely select content, but act as active agents in the construction of new forms of digital subjectivity, shaping emotions, preferences and patterns of meaning.

In a context characterised by multiple temporalities and pervasive, though often unacknowledged, surveillance, this work aims to contribute to a more articulated understanding of human-algorithm interaction. It offers theoretical and political implications for the contemporary sociological debate on platform society.

Youth Experiencing the Algorithmic Flow: The Shared Understanding of Contemporary Social Media Consumption

Luca Giuffrè — 2026-05-12

This article investigates how young people experience and cope with the algorithmically curated streams of content that characterise platforms such as TikTok. The study aims to expand current understandings of adolescents’ practical engagement with social media, introducing new nuances to what it means to be “competent” in such environments as defined by their own perspectives and practices. In doing so, it moves beyond deficit narratives of youth as passive consumers, instead emphasising their situated agency in navigating algorithmically shaped spaces.

The article builds on theoretical frameworks from youth studies and critical digital literacies, extending recent debates on algorithmic flows and agency. These perspectives offer tools to understand how datafication, recommendation systems, and evolving digital literacies intersect with identity formation and peer culture in networked media environments. By focusing on how adolescents internalise and tactically negotiate these flows, the study contributes to reframing digital competence as adaptive, reflexive, and socially distributed.

Empirically, the research draws on qualitative data collected through class-level group interviews with approximately 100 Italian high school students aged 17–19.

Findings indicate that adolescents perceive algorithmic flow as always-on, ephemeral, seamlessly adaptive, and closely tied to personal and social identity. Within this dynamic, they develop tactical practices, such as selective scrolling, skipping, liking, or saving, that co-construct their feeds. These practices highlight how algorithmic agency is understood, appropriated, and embodied as a dimension of contemporary youth culture.

Algorithmic Medias Res: YouTube Shorts, Affordances, and the Reconfiguration of Agency in Digital Consumption Practices

Ilir Rama — 2026-05-12

Digital platforms have influenced and reshaped the consumption of culture, entertainment, and news through their sociotechnical nature and algorithmic systems. Scholarly approaches to studying content flows within these environments have emphasized various perspectives: some focus on algorithmic systems’ power in structuring environments that aggregate similar viewpoints, while others highlight user agency in resisting and repurposing platforms, still others focus on combinations of the two. This paper contributes to this debate through a longitudinal analysis of YouTube, based on data from 107 Italian users, comprising over three million data points across a decade. By triangulating users’ searches and consumed content, this article considers how individuals navigate algorithmic recommendations while accounting for platform-level changes such as the introduction of YouTube Shorts. Findings reveal users increasingly consumed content while relying less on search features and more on algorithmic systems, demonstrating how new affordances can restructure user agency beyond algorithmic optimization alone. Rather than viewing agency as residing with either platforms or users, findings concur in pointing to how platforms frame agency, but it is ultimately co-constructed by technical, social, and cultural components. This in turn requires methodological approaches that can capture the evolution of the platform and the affordances framing digital consumption within it.

Data Donation From YouTube and TikTok Users: How We Implemented It

Andrea Russo — 2026-05-12

The rapid evolution of the Internet continues to reshape the methodological landscape of social science research. Digital methods, although relatively new, have already undergone several key transformations. From the initial ”follow the medium” paradigm, enabled by early 2000s website architectures and open APIs, to the current post-API context, marked by platform-driven restrictions on data access, researchers now face increasing constraints in obtaining platform-generated data. In response, a growing body of scholarship advocates for a shift toward user-centric approaches, with data donation emerging as a particularly promising methodological alternative. Data donation involves participants voluntarily sharing their digital trace data, offering rich, contextualized insights into online behavior while upholding ethical standards. Despite its potential, practical knowledge on how to implement data donation in empirical research remains limited.

This methodological article contributes to filling that gap by presenting the practical experience developed in the AlgoFeed project, in which 240 participants were involved in a study that included the donation of their YouTube and TikTok data to investigate feedback loops between algorithms and user behavior. We detail the project’s sampling strategy, data handling procedures, enrichment techniques, and legal considerations under the European regulatory framework.

This practical implementation illustrates how data donation can help overcome platform-imposed barriers while enabling more participatory and ethically sound digital research.

Algorithmic Pragmatic Rationality: Street-Level Entrepreneurship in the Bazaar Economy on TikTok

Vincenzo Luise — 2026-05-12

Second-generation social media platforms such as TikTok have become key infrastructures for the economic participation of street-level entrepreneurs operating within the bazaar economies of the Global South. In these contexts, characterized by heterogeneous economic forms shaped by pragmatism and adaptability, the ability to interpret and interact with TikTok’s algorithm is essential. Street-level entrepreneurs’ capacity to respond to algorithmic logic plays a crucial role in crafting engagement strategies aimed at sustaining their daily economic livelihoods. The ability of street-level entrepreneurs to interpret, respond to, and strategically interact with algorithmic logic is crucial to developing engagement practices aimed at sustaining daily economic livelihoods. This study conceptualizes these practices as forms of algorithmic pragmatic rationality – a situated, experiential mode of interaction with algorithmic systems oriented toward economic survival in marginal contexts. Adopting a user-centric perspective, this study employs semi-structured interviews with 16 street-level entrepreneurs who actively create content on TikTok to promote their businesses. It aims to investigate how they perceive and engage with the platform’s algorithmic system to attract consumers and increase revenue. The main findings reveal varying assumptions about TikTok’s algorithm, often reduced to a simplified notion of automated content visibility governing online virality. Participants also demonstrate a strong engagement in leveraging algorithmic logic for business advantage, while highlighting the emotional costs associated with the constant engagement required to maintain high levels of visibility. Forms of algorithmic awareness, strategic repertoires, and emotional impacts are creatively integrated into hybrid economic systems. In this sense, algorithmic engagement is not merely reactive. Still, it reflects a survival-oriented rationality that employs TikTok as a digital tool for active and situated economic participation in the context of the bazaar economy.

Adaptive Informality in Platform Capitalism: From Reluctant Digitalization to Bold TikTok Commerce in Southern Italy

Brigida Orria — 2026-05-12

This article rethinks informal economies as dynamic and generative components of capitalism, moving beyond definitions that treat them as marginal or deviant. Anchored in a Global South theoretical framework, based on qualitative methods and digital ethnography conducted in Naples and the Campania region, the study introduces the notion of “adaptive commerce” and “bold e-commerce”. We explore the evolving practices of informal trade across collaborative and hypervisible platforms such as Vinted and TikTok and delineate a continuum from discretionary, anonymized exchange to emotionally saturated, algorithmically mediated live commerce. The research outlines a shift from “reluctant digitalization”, marked by caution and anonymity, to “bold digitalization”, where exposure and performativity are embraced as economic assets. Three key points underpin this research: (1) the theorization of “bold digitalization” as a mode of platform-mediated informality marked by hyper-performativity and algorithmic visibility; (2) the identification of a platform governance spectrum, ranging from transactional discretion on Vinted to affective exposure on TikTok; and (3) the conceptual linkage between domestic labor, digital precarity, and economic spectacle. Informal economies, rather than resisting digital structures, actively shape and are simultaneously shaped by platform infrastructures, becoming central arenas of neoliberal experimentation. This reconceptualization challenges Eurocentric binaries of formal/informal and highlights informal economies as both zones of exploitation and engines of social creativity and economic innovation. The article calls for a critical reassessment of informal digital labor’s sustainability, gendered burdens, and potential to catalyze new socio-economic imaginaries.

Fast Tours and Short Videos. TikTok Napoli, Popular Mediatization of the City and Tourist Consumer Cultures

Luca Recano — 2026-05-12

The popular appropriation of TikTok in Naples overlaps with the city’s ongoing touristification, generating distinctive mediatization forms. Within this convergence, a new phase of platformization intersects with the repositioning of micro-businesses and informal labor into tourism-driven economies, supporting ‘touristification from below’. Through vernacular creativity, local actors gain representational agency and reputational capital, challenging institutional prerogatives in destination management and tourist marketing while generating new forms of visibility and value entangled with tourist consumption. Users’ practices – including advertainment and local branding techniques – transform urban spaces, cultural identities and everyday life elements into semiotic resources, easily iconized and reproduced as platform content, participating in the co-production of the city’s image as a tourist consumption site. Drawing on digital ethnography of ‘TikTok Napoli’, this article examines how grassroots platform-mediated practices engage in the spatial division of tourist consumption and what contradictions emerge. TikTok Napoli is conceptualized both as a socio-technical infrastructure and a translocal mediascape, that operates ambiguously. While it enables conventionally marginalized actors to develop creative agency and economic opportunities, it simultaneously reinforces tourist clichés, flattening urban imagery into stereotyped spectacles shaped by algorithmic distribution and market imperatives. Rather than democratizing the urban mediascape, such participatory mediatization exacerbates tourist consumerism and the commodification of urban spaces and experiences. The study contributes to debates on platformization, local branding, and spatialized consumption in urban transformations, offering critical insights into platforms’ socio-spatial integrations and the ambivalent role of digital technologies where urban life and culture become raw material for tourist economies.

The Pursuit of Pleasure on TikTok Between Eros and Consumption as a Matter of Popular Habitus

Roberto Graziano — 2026-05-12

Amid ongoing debates on the platformisation of consumer culture, in which both the value of commodities and the processes through which subjective identities are shaped are increasingly mediated by digital infrastructures, TikTok appears to reconfigure the relationship between platforms and local contexts. Rather than simply amplifying globalised aesthetic models, the platform enables forms of bottom-up visibility through which popular cultures articulate and display their own modes of self-representation, deeply embedded in specific autochthonous settings.

In this exploratory study, I examine how young people from the Neapolitan popular milieu construct models of desirable masculinity, and how local creators simultaneously contribute to the emergence of a popular gastronomic aesthetic, defined here as gourmand. Through the qualitative analysis of digital content, the two case studies provide an analytical lens to investigate how subjects who embody a popular habitus participate in the mediated reproduction of Neapolitan popular culture on TikTok.

Dissecting the Generative AI Chatbot App Landscape: Distribution, Narratives, and Infrastructural Logics

Vincenzo Laezza — 2026-05-12

This study explores the distribution, organization, and narrative structures of applications integrating generative AI-based chatbots. Using a semantic network analysis combined with a qualitative walkthrough, it investigates how chatbot apps are thematically and functionally positioned within the digital ecosystem. Based on a corpus of 2,018 applications published between 2023 and 2024 and collected from major AI tool aggregators, the study identifies 16 modular clusters reflecting different functional and semantic logics. Results highlight the emergence of socio-technical hubs, the central role of foundational models like ChatGPT, and the progressive formation of infrastructural ecosystems that function as or are consolidating into super-app constellations. The research offers insights into how chatbot apps structure user interactions, operational practices, and socio-technical assemblages.

Posting What You Know and Caring for the Niche: How Micro-Influencers Survive Platform Culture Demands

Camilla Volpe — 2026-05-12

In recent years, platforms such as Instagram and TikTok have become central arenas for the performance of identity, consumption, and social values. Within this platformized ecosystem, second-hand fashion has emerged as a highly visible and narrativised content niche, particularly among micro-influencers. While second-hand consumption has long been linked to subcultural distinction and sustainability, its current digital mediation raises new questions about visibility, labour, and legitimacy. This article explores how micro-influencers represent and perform second-hand fashion on Instagram and TikTok and it investigates to what extent these practices reflect niche care and ethical commitment, or rather strategic acts of self-branding under platform pressures.

Drawing on digital ethnography and semi-structured interviews, the study analyses how content creators navigate the demands of platform culture while attempting to professionalise their identities. Findings show that second-hand fashion is often selected not purely for ideological reasons, but because it is already familiar and easier to mobilise within the repetitive demands of content production, functioning as a sustainable and recognisable niche. These influencers present their work as a form of care and advocacy, yet such positioning simultaneously functions as reputational labour aimed at achieving visibility and legitimacy. Situated at the intersection of precarity, care, and professionalisation, these practices reveal how affective and ethical narratives are shaped and constrained by platform infrastructures. Rather than viewing these performances as inauthentic, the article argues for their interpretation as complex strategies of survival within the contemporary attention economy.

Your Favorite Italian Pornstar! Valentina Nappi, Onlyfans and the Platformization of Porn

Sofia Torre — 2026-05-12

This article examines the relationship between pornographic transgression and the digital platforms through which it is articulated, with particular attention to OnlyFans and the porn star Valentina Nappi’s OnlyFans profile. Combining reflections on the cultural positioning of pornography with the theoretical framework and methodology of celebrity studies, as well as with a critical analysis of feminist and postfeminist discourse on pornography, this article will first provide a historical and social overview of the mainstream sphere and of feminist responses to pornography focusing on OnlyFans. This article will first provide a historical and social overview of the pornification of the mainstream sphere and of feminist responses to pornography focusing on OnlyFans. Secondly, it will analyze the construction of Valentina Nappi’s public image in the Italian context, drawing on a variety of sources, such as OnlyFans productions, trade journals, mainstream media, public appearances, general press, and social media selected for their theoretical and historical relevance. Findings show Valentina Nappi’s OnlyFans profile enables a reconceptualization of the star-as-celebrity within a historical and spatial framework, wherein the private sphere becomes a site of public and intellectual debate. In this context, the figure of the porn performer semantically overlaps with the “legitimate” public persona of the star.