The fascination with platform-based cultural production and consumption reflects contemporary youth's desire for expression and connection. Photo: TUCHONG

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Platforms are increasingly becoming a form of cultural infrastructure wherein contemporary youth strive to find meaning. “Youth culture,” as discussed in this article, broadly refers to the lifestyles and practices of today’s young people. The article aims to reveal how digital platforms shape the cultural imagination of contemporary youth and weave their own network of meaning.

Over the past decade, platforms have gained much visibility in academic, commercial, and social governance communities. However, we have excessively focused on the rise of platforms while overlooking their gradual integration into everyday life. For today’s young people, the role of platforms is subtly shifting. The emergence of a “mediatized existence” has stripped away the ceremonial elements of the interface between platforms and life, turning them into a direct source of everyday companionship.

Henri Lefebvre’s critique of everyday life provides inspiration for the discussion of the “everydayness of platforms” in this article. Lefebvre viewed everyday life as a secular, mundane and all-encompassing process, filled with trivial habits, routines, objects, relationships, emotions, and individual experiences, yet also imbued with pervasive artistic, poetic, and cultural practices. A micro-revolution of everyday life is essential for overcoming alienation and embracing autonomy.

Drawing on Lefebvre’s insights, this article seeks to uncover the agency of youth engaging in platform production and consumption. In the context of platform-based living, everyday life is not merely a form of alienation, but is brimming with the cultural micro-revolutions of youth, intricately intertwining their emotions with reality. Compared to previous generations, today’s youth are more attuned to the everydayness of their lives and the meaning that extends from it.

The ways in which individuals use, imagine, appropriate, and arrange platforms reflect young people’s reverse “domestication” of platforms and their active agency. In the seemingly mundane, trivial, and repetitive online cultural archives, young people find anchors of emotional resonance. Through co-creation with platforms, they unconsciously create dynamic cultural maps that weave together self and other, global and local, distant and proximate.

The pursuit of “authenticity” is central to understanding youth everydayness on platforms. In the platform era, young people aim to remain true to themselves while also seeking affection and benefits through personalized expression. Many young creators attain the status of “micro-celebrities” by presenting their real lives. Though they gain recognition among their modest following, they are more willing to expose their true selves than traditional celebrities. Unlike traditional celebrities, micro-celebrities must exhibit accessibility, availability, presence, and connectivity, all of which are grounded in authenticity. In some respects, this aligns with and contributes to platform commercialization. Micro-celebrities achieve “self-branding” through continuous efforts to appeal to followers, measuring success by clicks, shares, and likes.

If authenticity constitutes an important principle for platform content creators, “self-platformization” is an everyday lifestyle prevalent among young people. Self-platformization refers to a process in which young people readily organize their everyday lives and reshape their conceptions according to platform logic. For them, platforms are no longer simply a tool-like regulatory mechanism for content production and distribution but have become integral to the details of their lives and unconscious actions.

Lefebvre noted that the transformation of temporality by capitalism was a notable manifestation of the alienation of modern life. The “natural rhythms” of everyday life are replaced by the “social rhythms” of post-industrial labor and leisure. Platform rhythms undoubtedly represent a social rhythm. On one hand, young people “transcode” their everyday lives via digital devices and intelligent technologies, generating a highly appealing platform consumption rhythm. On the other hand, they skillfully and seamlessly navigate between multiple platforms, constructing a life experience characterized by parallel spatiotemporalities and accelerated time.

The fascination with platform-based cultural production and consumption reflects contemporary youth’s desire for expression and connection. The changing times resonate in their everyday lives, rendering platform-oriented expression a new pathway for breaking free from external constraints and reclaiming individual autonomy.

Sun Ping (associate professor), He Jinna and Liu Zijun are from the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Edited by WANG YOURAN