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

n 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.These two tendencies –an intensification of the infrastructural power of platforms, and their increasing popular appropriation –can be illustrated by the arrival of TikTok. Coming out of a Chinese path of development, distinct from the Silicon Valley origins of the preceding generation of platforms like Facebook, Instagram or Amazon (Arvidsson & Guo, 2026; Williams & Gilbert, 2022), the rapid growth of TikTok has introduced a new global paradigm of platformization, in the sense that formerly dominant platforms like Facebook and Instagram is now imitating many of its distinct features. This ‘tiktokization’ of social media (Schwarz, 2025, p. 7) has promoted two major novelties across platform cultures.First TikTok tends to privilege algorithmic mediation over the ‘social graph’ model that structured (earlier versions) of Silicon Valley social media platforms. That is, the TikTok algorithm does not privilege the interests and activities that manifest in users’ social network in determining the distribution of content. Rather, it uses a complex array of factors that include detailed data on individual user behaviour (scroll time, or time spent watching videos) along with data on momentary trends as well as local developments. This way TikTok replaces the traditional social media public–embodied in a network of followers or of hashtags–with a social media experience organized around a ‘clustered public’ (Gerbaudo, 2024) of disconnected users, who do not share a common digital ‘space’, but rather are served content on the basis of a statistical analysis of expressed interests and doings, along with geographical proximity and momentary trends like songs, gags or dance moves (Bhandari & Bimo, 2022). TikTok’s algorithm thus provides an alternative infrastructure for the determination of tastes and the diffusion of content. Indeed, some suggest that TikTok should not be understood as a socialmedium at all, but rather as a novel form of ‘algorithmic media’ (Liang, 2022) that shares important characteristics with the flow experience of television (Faltesek et al. 2023), albeit a personalized television that caters to the local and the momentarily popular.At the same time, TikTok–and the novel social media environment that the platform has inspired–has significantly lowered the barriers for participation. While Instagram, the main platform for the ‘influencer economy’ of the 2010s, tended to impose a unified aesthetic–what Lev Manovich (2017) called ‘Instagramism’–that required a significant amount of cultural capital to realize, TikTok is open to a wide diversity of content, also coming from what Lin andde Kloet (2023) call ‘unlikely content creators’ of popular origins. As a result, TikTok has been appropriated by a wide variety of users who use the platform not simply to stage a marketable self (Gershon, 2014) but also to pursue a wide range of ‘industrious’ small scale enterprises: dropshipping, livestreaming, micro-influencing a wide variety of similar ‘digital hustles’ that often supplement family incomes (Arvidsson et al. 2025).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.The issue is organized into two thematically interconnected sections. Section I, Platformization and Algorithmic Interplay, investigates the epistemic and empirical foundations of social research in algorithmically mediated spaces in this novel platform environment. It focuses on methodological innovations (such as digital data donation and adaptive frameworks), shifting patterns of cultural consumption, and users’ agency within the evolving affordances of social media platforms. This section examines how algorithmic infrastructures and datafication processes are transforming both research tools and interpretative models, with particular attention to issues of algorithmic awareness and consumer behaviours on platforms like TikTok and YouTube. These contributions provide analytical insights into how platform-specific logics shape both research practices and everyday content engagement, illuminating the fluid boundaries between media production, consumption, and interpretation in platformized environments.Section II, Popular platform practices, shifts the focus to vernacular uses of platforms and grassroots digital agency. Contributions in this section explore how micro-entrepreneurs, informal sellers, influencers, and everyday users engage with and respond to algorithmic systems in creative, strategic, and situated ways. Through empirical analyses of TikTok cultures, generative AI chatbot landscapes, and local economies of visibility, the papers reveal the pragmatic rationalities and sociocultural repertoires that underpin digital participation from below. This section gives voice to forms of popular platform use, where creativity, survival, and cultural negotiation intertwine in the face of opaque algorithmic mechanisms. Papers in this section highlight howusers—ranging from microentrepreneurs to tourist operators—navigate, negotiate, and sometimes resist algorithmic power, offering insights into hybrid models of sustainability, cultural expression, and digital capitalism after what we are tempted to call the ‘infrastructural turn’ in digital media.