A TikTok assemblage

Abstract

In this chapter, we explore our collective enmeshment in a TikTok assemblage through what we call radical media engagement. We investigate the creative, educational, and generative potential of this social media platform within a network of affecting bodies, including cell phone, mother, daughter, friends, home, school, popular culture, corporate censorship, and user resistance. To explore these interconnected multiplicities, we take up the immanent theorizing of Deleuze and Guattari, who highlight assemblages as shifting sets of conditional relations among bodies. This approach moves beyond reductive accounts by investigating how bodies are mutual becomings that affect each other in unpredictable ways. Through post qualitative inquiry, we attune ourselves to how we are embedded in this relational network by watching and making TikToks together. In so doing, we seek to upend traditional knowledge structures that perpetuate power dichotomies, such as adult/child and researcher/participant, as well as media panics circumscribing girls’ online lives.