Conference Agenda

Starting from its launch in China in 2016 as Douyin, the social media TikTok has become a worldwide success. According to a statistical report conducted in January 2022, TikTok is available in over 150 countries and 75 different languages and is the fastest growing social media application worldwide (Southern, 2021; TikTok Statistics, 2022).

Such a phenomenon, as expected, has given rise to a huge scientific literature, spanning from medical studies to sociology, from psychology to communication, from computer studies to anthropology. Within the boundaries of educational studies, scholarship has primarily focused on questions of TikTok usefulness—or lack thereof—to share specific learning contents (Escamilla-Fajardo, Alguagil, Lopéz-Carrill, 2021; Lee, 2022; Rach and Lounis, 2020), while the peculiar phenomenology of TikTok engagement remains, at least to my knowledge, still unaddressed. In this paper, I attempt to fill the gap by going deep in the phenomenology of engagement TikTok arouses, thus attempting to sketch out some educational remarks about experience, time, and attention in education. Specifically, I shall ask a) which kind of temporality and attention is constituted through this social media, b) which kind of experience girls and boys undergo when being-in-TikTok, and c) which the role of education may be when dealing with TikTok engagement. Central to my analysis is Stiegler’s insight that “technics, far from being merely in time, properly constitutes time.” (1998/1994, 27)

And here we come to TikTok specific temporality. The continuity between past, present and future which one is supposed to maintain when paying attention and dealing with others and things is, conversely, continuously disrupted when being-in-TikTok. The user, given the functioning of the platform, has no memory of videos being watched, nor expectations about videos to come are being formed. With its continuous change of fast-paced videos one has no time to feel and appreciate—let alone reflecting on—the emotions elicited by a video that the subsequent one has already started. While being-in-TikTok the subject has no need to act and think, while the relationship with one’s emotions and feelings is left aside, too, interrupted again and again by the flow of videos.

In this way TikTok, I argue, creates a peculiar temporality, one that momentarily erases both past and future—thus erasing, at the very same time, the weight of memory and the task and burden of future projecting. It is a kind of uniform, suspended time, with no pause, no hollow, no change in speed. When being-in-TikTok both one’s projecting and one’s “being-together-with things at hand” (Heidegger, 1996/1927, 374) are suspended, deferred to a time and space yet to come.

However, while, drawing from Stiegler’s analysis of new social media, it may be tempting to label TikTok as a threat to anything of value “the family, the school, the totality of teaching and cultural institutions” (2010a, 184) can produce, I believe something more is going on here. This is so not because TikTok—or others social media, for that matter—cannot be a threat—indeed, they can. Rather, this is so for a) we have to make sense of how TikTok works, in order to understand and deal with such a potential harmfulness and threat; and b) TikTok is not just harmful; being-in-TikTok also involves a rupture of temporality which is worth analysing educationally.

Covid-19 is an emergency that has changed people's behaviour, their way of life, and even political agendas, in almost all corners of the world. Listening to and capturing the experiences and perspectives of all citizens on the pandemic seems consistent with our sense of an inclusive, democratic society, but the voices of children are often left out. Research led by the University of Central Lancashire shows that, of the 95 professionals, from 16 sectors and 20 countries across Europe, surveyed in April 2020, there is little evidence of children’s views informing public decision-making (Larkins, 2020). Around seventy per cent of survey participants said that there is no attempt was made to take the child's perspective in making policy (local or national) relevant to children (Larkins, 2020).

In the UK, the Prime Minister announced to close schools to control the pandemic on 18th March 2020. Instead of giving priority to children's welfare and opinions, stopping schooling is to "make sure the critical parts of the economy keep functioning and public services keep functioning." (Prime Minister’s statement on coronavirus (COVID-19), 2020) And also, schools open for key workers' children because "we need health workers who are also parents to continue to go to work. And we need other critical workers with children to keep doing their jobs too – from police officers who are keeping us safe to the supermarket delivery drivers, social care workers who look after the elderly and who are so vital".

In this way, children are not only unheard of in coronavirus political and ethical discussions but are often seen in a deficit manner - as the burdens that prevent parents from working for society, or as potential carriers of the virus and need to be protected and restricted to protect themselves and others. For instance, many policies, such as school closures, are developed based on the model's assumption that children's presence in school accelerates the spread of the virus (Panovska-Griffiths et al., 2020).

From children’s perspective, children may accept this kind of adult view, seeing political and ethical issues as irrelevant and distant, therefore, rarely thinking and saying about them. However, children are a part of society and a significant component of citizens. Although children do not have as many political responsibilities and obligations as adults, they share social welfare. Also, children are future voters and legal participants in politics. Thus children's political and ethical education is also a political issue. I suggest that, on the one hand, adults are supposed to pay attention to children's role in the community; on the other hand, it would be valuable for children to think about their position in the community, take responsibility and ask for rights.

The pandemic could be a valuable opportunity for children to realise the necessity of their engagement in political and ethical discussions. Many of these issues may seem to arise from the pandemic, but they are, in fact, issues that are rooted in our society. Before the pandemic, they already existed in society, but may be distant and vague to most children. The pandemic has made them more visible and more relevant to a wider range of children, so I discuss those issues in the context of the pandemic and post-pandemic era.

In this paper, I will introduce several political and ethical issues that might be related to children in terms of the pandemic: the distribution of social resources, the debate between individual freedom and collective responsibility, and the technology divide in education.