Experience machines for well-being? Understanding how social media entertainment matters for teens

Abstract

This article explores how social media entertainment matters for teens and does so by connecting experiences to conditions crucial for well-being. I ask if and how teens experience the content they seek and encounter on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram as worthwhile and meaningful. To answer this question, I analyse qualitative interviews with Norwegian teens. The analysis portrays how teens experience social media entertainment as meaningful in how content connects to self-formation processes, to the need for belonging, and to the agency they perceive to have in user-platforms relations. Theoretically, the study draws on two overlapping but currently unconnected fields of research: media psychology-informed entertainment studies and a capabilities approach. My theoretical aim is to elucidate how these fields complement and contrast each other in relating media experience to well-being. I argue that media psychology offers an operationalization of the same well-being conditions that are central in a capabilities approach, while the latter opens a space for a critique of the platform economy.