School Imaginaries in TikTok

Abstract

The school that children and teenagers experience and imagine today passes through platforms for sharing short videos, just a few seconds in length, that are consumed in succession, uninterrupted, and for hours on end. The revolution that allows anyone with a digital device to become a public content producer, at the same time allows school, as a privileged context in young people's lives, to be viewed from multiple perspectives. The concepts of authorship, privacy, and visibility have profoundly changed and pose continuous challenges to the adult world. One wonders what are the dominant imaginaries in such products and, from a critical perspective, whether the communicative strategies conveyed belong to the producers, or to the owners of the software that spread them; finally, whether it is possible to use such tools in a critical and even revolutionary way.