What a medium affords a given person is relative to the polymedia environment they navigate—that is, the integrated environment of communicative opportunities people have available to facilitate their everyday social lives (Madianou and Miller, 2013). For young adults, such as my participants, TikTok emerged as the latest addition to an already mature polymedia environment. Unlike teens, for whom TikTok was found to often be their first social media platform (De Leyn et al., 2022), adults usually had been actively engaging socially online on various platforms already when they encountered TikTok. For my participants, it was precisely a dissatisfaction with other platforms that shaped how they envisioned the affordances and appeal of TikTok (see Schellewald, 2023).

For instance, many reported to me that on sites such as Twitter (now X), they felt pressure to interact. This was caused by the platform’s affordance of participation—low barriers to contributing in short, textual form. This mobilizing force of Twitter has been theorized as an “affective refrain” that draws people into shared discussion (Papacharissi, 2014)—an experience that the young adults I met experienced as overwhelming. Similarly, the young adults I worked with noted that on sites such as Instagram, they often felt pressure to interact with the content of friends and family members, creating a social burden (see also Au, 2021).

The TikTok “For You” page and the ephemeral interactions with content that it mediates afforded my participants a form of disconnection. They found TikTok appealing for the “authenticity” that is associated with the platform, which itself is a quality emerging at the intersection of the platform’s design and vernacular ways of expression (Barta and Andalibi, 2021). For my participants, TikTok afforded them something liberating: the ability to feel socially connected to what they called “ordinary strangers.” These were perceived as just normal people who could easily be related to, yet free from any social obligation toward them. This echoes other theorizations of TikTok viewing as “uncommitted attention,” a form of engagement that is immersive yet unstable (Siles and Valerio-Alfaro, 2025)—as well as discussion of TikTok creator cultures being defined by characteristics of authenticity, relatability, and audience interactivity (Abidin, 2020).

One way to make sense of this modality is by drawing inspiration from Simmel’s (1949) study of sociability. Simmel describes sociability as interaction practiced for its own sake—a modality where value lies less in outcomes than in the pleasurable play of association itself, freed from the demands of personal interests and social obligation (1949, p. 255). While Simmel was primarily writing about situations of co-present interaction, his idea of sociability can serve us as a useful orientation to understand interactive dynamics in algorithmically mediated spaces such as the “For You” page. The association mediated on the “For You” page resonates with what Simmel described as an “ideal sociological world” (1949, p. 257). Participants described to me encounters with “ordinary strangers” that felt light, pleasurable, and detached from durable commitments, qualities that echo Simmel’s idea of sociability, while at the same time taking on a distinctively mediated form.

In return, it will not come as a surprise, then, that my participants did not primarily engage with TikTok as a means of participating in social movements. That is to say, they encountered content from such movements—such as the Black Lives Matter protests at the time in 2020 and 2021—but did not actively follow them. TikTok remains, in that sense, a space in which political discourses unfold and are negotiated (Literat and Kligler-Vilenchik, 2021). At the same time, the structural form of the “For You” page raises questions. It does involve matters of sustained audience engagement (see also Tufekci, 2017) and the possibility of public connection on the grounds of shared concerns (Couldry and Markham, 2006).

The modality of ephemeral social interaction afforded by people’s navigation of the “For You” thus warrants us to remain critical. If, following Simmel, we can think of these dynamics as resembling a form of sociability, then we must also ask what is gained and what is lost, in terms of affordances for public connection, when encounters are ephemerally mediated in such ways rather than durably networked socially. What does it mean, in other words, to engage and move people on a platform where disconnected sociability and uncommitted attention (Siles and Valerio-Alfaro, 2025) are not incidental but structurally inscribed modalities of social engagement?

One way in which TikTok stands out from other platforms as a medium for public connection is precisely a consequence of its “For You” page’s centrality. Through the relative openness of the “For You” page—and similar personalized and trend-driven content feeds—TikTok constitutes an immersive “live” space (Lupinacci, 2021), a dynamic assemblage of lived experiences shared in short-video form (Lin et al., 2023). The subversive potential of that textual openness is demonstrated in scholarship showing how social groups utilize hashtags or sounds to creatively integrate their lived experience in discourses on the app (e.g., Peterson-Salahuddin, 2024), achieving visibility by speaking in ways that circumvent the logics enforced through algorithmic moderation and content curation systems (Steen et al., 2023).

These bottom-up acts of resistance to dominant discursive structures—and to the broader visibility logics of the TikTok platform economy (Su, 2023)—demonstrate the tactical potential enabled by TikTok’s affordances. Tactics, broadly following de Certeau (1984) here, are about the clever and opportunistic utilization of limited resources. The open textual structure of the “For You” page affords that kind of opportunistic resistance in the absence of larger structural interventions, which elsewhere have been positioned as a reason for rising feelings of digital resignation (Draper and Turow, 2019).

During my early fieldwork, this became evident to me through acts of care some TikTok content articulated. Back then, there was a strong moral debate about the supposed “addictiveness” of the app—a consequence of the app’s “endless scroll” design creating a continuous, immersive flow experience (Lupinacci, 2021). What caught my interest during this time were encounters with videos created and shared purely for the purpose of breaking the immersive flow of other people’s scrolling. Some playfully expressed that one had reached “the end of TikTok,” an embodied interruption that temporarily suspended the scroll. Others more explicitly articulated care in the form of reminders to take a break or drink water (see Schellewald, 2022). These moments of disruption stood out not as discursive circumventions of censorship but as affective interventions into the very texture of TikTok’s centralized experience.

This type of bottom-up intervention on another person’s “For You” page is relatively unique to TikTok’s design. It is tactical, not in the sense of evading constraints toward visibility, but in its capacity to modulate the affective experience of individual TikTok scrollers. By cleverly utilizing the platform’s affordances and architecture, these interventions integrate acts of communal care into the very flow experience of consumption. The ephemerality of TikTok content, its shortness, affords these forms of infrapolitical resistance (Lin, 2025; Siles, 2023). They align with the disconnected sociability outlined before. That is to say, they are acts of resistance unfolding in the absence of both durable social organization and the possibility of enduring structural change.

Examples such as the “end of TikTok” clips demonstrate a different form of resistance than discursive subversions (e.g., Peterson-Salahuddin, 2024). While tactics such as “algospeak” (Steen et al., 2023) operate on the more traditional level of discursive language and visibility, the “end of TikTok” example showcases a form of resistance on the level of affective experience. These acts of resistance work by disrupting the immersive continuity of TikTok’s hegemonic structure, producing momentary pauses that reorient attention, even while leaving the platform’s integrity intact. TikTok’s affordance for commentary (Quick and Maddox, 2024) and remix practices (Zulli and Zulli, 2022) enable the material manifestation of infrapolitical resistance in that sense, doing so not at the margins but at the very core of the “For You” page as a space for public connection.

Collectively coordinated action remains, of course, vital in the digital context (Natale and Treré, 2020). At the same time, TikTok seems to foreground the potential vitality of ephemeral resistance that intervenes directly in the immersive social ambience of TikTok. Rather than accumulating into an “affective refrain” of social movement and political will (Papacharissi, 2014), these acts manifest as embodied interruptions—moments of tension, pause, or care—that shape how the “For You” page is experienced not as a personal but communal site. In this sense, resistance on TikTok emerges increasingly as a tactical modulation of the sensorial orchestration of the app as a space for public connection (Lupinacci, 2024).

A vital yet, in my view, underexplored affordance of TikTok in relation to these matters discussed is content sharing. TikTok is here, not necessarily unique in that it enables sharing videos with others. More broadly, research finds that people associate values of togetherness and care with sharing (Scharlach and Hallinan, 2023), aligning it with earlier examples of communal care. Content sharing practices emerge as interesting here, how they blend social domains in a way that has been studied foundationally across the history of the communication field (e.g., Katz and Lazarsfeld, 1955).

When people share content from the “For You” page, they “singularize videos that had been circulating for everybody” and transform them into cultural artefacts that matter inside social networks (Siles, 2023, p. 136). These audience practices exemplify the creative nature of consumption—the way in which consumption is about the habitual yet thoughtful process of re-contextualization (Miller, 1987). Although my participants’ experience on TikTok was marked by a mode of disconnected sociability, the app still had a strong social impact. From cooking “TikTok meals” with family members to discussing viral memes with friends to watching videos together with siblings or simply sharing them in group chats—as a cultural phenomenon, TikTok substantially shaped how my participants connected in their social networks (see Schellewald, 2024a,b).

Like other research has found at different times, even though media consumption seems to increasingly become more of a personal matter, people continue to talk about media in their everyday social lives (Couldry and Markham, 2006). It is precisely in such forms of everyday talk, and the domain of “personal influence” (Katz and Lazarsfeld, 1955), that ultimately questions of social change and movement need to be studied from a communication point of view.

TikTok’s platform architecture affords vibrant creativity and cultural exchange (Kaye et al., 2022) and creates spaces where people seem to feel a sense of affinity for groups and movements (Maddox and Gill, 2023). Affinity is in that sense of critical political importance—a defining element that has reshaped the modality of how people orient themselves in social movements and democratic processes more broadly (Manning and Holmes, 2014). Disconnected sociability might, in that sense, afford convenient associations, mediating a sense of affinity to social movements in which one feels at once authentically engaged yet not overwhelmingly committed.

To understand the change of such experiences, to me, appears thus a question of creativity in the sense of translation. For example, how are TikTok discourses discussed and used in schools to build connections (e.g., Boffone, 2021)? Or how do TikToks form the semantic material that shapes group dynamics and inclusion (e.g., McLean et al., 2024)? How does TikTok afford, differently from other media, translating a sense of affinity into more durable public engagement across the domain of the everyday? For it is within everyday micro-social worlds—on the street, in the office or workshop, at the dinner table, and so on—that what we call society emerges and changes (Knorr-Cetina, 1988).