TikTok: Work, Time, and Play in a Platform Economy brings together papers that analyse emerging digital visual culture(s) and aesthetics through critical platform analyses. We are particularly interested in TikTok, as it is a platform where many dynamic digital subcultures proliferate and circulate. 

Over the last decade, the internet has been subsumed by a complex of privately owned online services that call themselves ‘platforms’. This has radically altered the coordinates of the internet, from a peer-to-peer communications infrastructure to an extractive arguably ‘neo-feudal’ system. 

In light of these recent shifts, the conference will rethink a number of questions about digital culture that were initially explored in the early 2010s, with the rise of Web 2.0. Papers will explore contemporary understandings of the construction of the self and collective identity, digital labour and cultural production, political discourse online, digital affect, and more. 

Keynotes by Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou and Y7 (Hannah Cobb & Declan Colquitt).

Full programme

09:00 Coffee and Tea

09:30 Content Providers Introduction (morning session)

09:40 “Working Around the Clock App. Algospeak As Content Creation    Strategy on TikTok” – Daniel Klug

10:00 “Reimagining Work and Domesticity: The Stay-at-Home-Girlfriend Phenomenon on TikTok” – Marsha Batubara & Lucia Bainotti

10:20 “‘Scraper’ and the Folkless Lore of Ritualised Prediction” – Most Dismal Swamp

10:40 Break

11:00 “FIRST PHONE (2024)” – Ruba Al-Sweel

11:20 “Artistic Resistance in the Era of TikTok/Douyin” – Shiyu Gao

11:40 Q & A work and time

12:00 Lunch and Refreshments

12:50 Content Providers Introduction (afternoon session)

13:00 Keynote and Q & A- Y7

14:00 ““Stich Incoming”: TikTok Tarot Reading and the Return of the Scam” -Karen Gregory

14:20 “Counterspeculative Constellations: A card reading format to unsettle the use of tarot and astrology in queer feminist artistic practice” – Frances Breden

14:40 “‘This Message Is For You’: Decoding Angelic Interfaces and Images on TikTok” – Sara Nuta

15:00 Q & A play

15:10 Break

15:30 Keynote and Q & A – Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou

17:00 Drinks Reception

Please, register for attendance via Eventbrite before 7th June.

Content Providers is a research collaboration between researchers Ian Rothwell (University of Edinburgh), Idil Galip (University of Amsterdam), Ingrid Luquet-Gad (University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne).

The conference is supported by The New Real and the Edinburgh College of Art, with additional funding from the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Science.