In this thesis, I explore what TikTok trends can tell us about users and their practices, from a media audience research perspective. Social media trends reflect user preferences and practices, thereby providing a window into what is important to users, and on TikTok, trends play an especially central role. I also examine the opportunities and limitations of using social media data, especially via a hybrid methods approach, to research media audiences.
Through this research, I make three original contributions to knowledge. Firstly, I argue that trends provide a lens and platform for studying and enacting sociologically significant phenomena. In their interactions with other users and in their content creation, users engage in personally and socially meaningful practices around trends.
Secondly, I propose that TikTok trends are created and defined by an interplay of user and platform influences. Unlike existing research which typically highlights the role of either user or platform, I show that trends are shaped and defined by TikTok’s curation and design, while user practices also play a key role in creating trends.
Finally, I argue that hybrid methods enable a layered and context-rich analysis of phenomena like TikTok trends, that captures broad patterns as well as nuanced, varied and detailed user dynamics. I show how, in my research, my use of hybrid methods enabled findings to be combined across scale and detail, thus producing a comprehensive representation of trends.
This interdisciplinary thesis contributes to digital sociology, media studies, and the social life of methods. I advance understandings of social media trends and of the uses of social media data for social research, particularly comments and social media videos (which Abidin et al 2020 and Highfield and Leaver 2016 (respectively) claim is needed). The thesis also advances social research methods, through empirical exploration of hybrid methods.
