Paper short abstract:

What kind of speculative communities does TikTok and a new generation of social media form?

Paper long abstract:

The Tick Tock of Speculative Communities: Folk economies of online worlds

In an increasingly digitised and financialised world, people are turning to smartphones and computer screens to understand this complex and uncertain space. They ‘speculate’ and form a ‘folk’ knowledge of the economy, markets, and historical processes they are entangled in. Against a background of much (abstract) theorising on the relevance of social media in the contemporary world, this talk reflects on a two-year collective ethnography project on TikTok and Social Media to highlight the speculative practices people are involved in to get to mediate the world around them. How might we – as anthropologists and social scientists – engage with these practices in a grounded manner? Who are the actors involved in the building of online worlds? How do these online worlds come to affect the economies and politics of the ‘offline’ world? This talk reflects on these diverse range of questions.