Sympathizing with Gen-Z: Reflections of Social Media Culture in TikTok

Abstract

Social media, which has become more essential in people's lives over the last two decades, on the one hand, creates a new social condition, a digital society, and on the other, changes people's everyday lives to a large extent. Social media deepens an intergenerational conflict between the young people who grew up with it, commonly referred to as the Z-generation, and the older generations, who are struggling to adapt to this new situation. As a reflection of this situation of conflict, bias towards younger generations occupies an important place in a significant part of the studies on social media. In these studies, young people are often portrayed as actors who, by all means, are permissible to become famous, pragmatists, and corrupt the moral values of society. Emerging as a critique of such approaches, this study tries to comprehend the new social condition created by social media. The study is based on a nethnographic analysis of the 58 highest-rated videos shot under the Buss It Challenge, which became a trend among young people on TikTok in early 2021. The study, on the one hand, reveals young people's perceptions of the ideal life and ideal body; on the other hand, it questions the projections of intercultural and gender differences in such videos. As a result, the study claims that an understanding of fame based on the sexualization of the female body, which is an important component of social media culture, is significantly shaped by neoliberal and patriarchal expectations, and social media alters the perception of time and space, which in turn reshapes the private and the public.