- Link to the cientific text: Far away so close: Young Italians and the consumption of war images in social networks di Enzo Colombo, Giulia Giorgi, Paola Rebughini, in Banash M., Halonen R. and Purronen, V. Dynamics of Uncertainty, Unrest and Fragility in Europe. Routledge, 2024 (forthcoming)
- Link to the scientific article: Asmolov G (2021) From sofa to frontline: The digital mediation and domestication of warfare. Media, War & Conflict 14(3): 342–365.
Launched in 2018, TikTok is now one of the most popular social networks among young people and teenagers. It is a Chinese platform on which short self-produced videos can be shared. Initially used to spread dance moves and musical choreographies, its content has expanded to include forms of commercial self-promotion and the coverage of events. Given its popularity, TikTok has also become a vector and a filter for the circulation of images related to wars. A study by the University of Milan focused on how the Russo-Ukrainian conflict is portrayed on TikTok. This is what emerged.
Between algorithms and precariousness, a more "classic" war
Considering that different platforms and algorithms can produce and filter representations of war that are very different from each other, TikTok seems to offer a predominantly domesticating and normalizing perspective on the conflict that has been at the center of Europe's concerns for over two years. On the other hand, this visual narrative takes place within a cultural and media context where public discourse on war tends to become more familiar. For a generation of young people already challenged by lockdowns and COVID, as well as by enduring job insecurity, the prospect of a war in Europe appears as a further encumbrance on their future. In public and media discourse, some form of war involving Europe no longer seems unlikely. The need to invest more in armaments is constantly emphasized by governments, and there is no shortage of proposals from European political leaders regarding the possibility of reintroducing conscription or establishing a European army. The image of increasingly sophisticated yet easily manageable and manipulable war technologies is also part of a scenario where the imagery of war appears increasingly present and vastly different from that of the Cold War era, focused on deterrence and nuclear self-destruction. The images of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict circulating in the media indeed resemble much more the classic wars of the past: wars between nations, where civilians were affected by bombings, and citizens who until shortly before had been employed in various occupations found themselves on the front line as soldiers.
Observing the imagery of the conflict from the perspective of an entertainment platform like TikTok can therefore provide a lot of useful information on how young people and teenagers come into contact with the theme of war, how this topic is filtered and re-elaborated, and how users see it represented and consequently consider it more or less as a plausible possibility. For this purpose, our research focused on qualitative analysis of content related to the Russo-Ukrainian conflict collected from the TikTok platform.
The 'TikTokization' of war, between everyday life and spectacle
It emerged from our analysis that the representation of war on TikTok comprises content of various types, including amateur videos of soldiers involved in the conflict (although it is mainly the soldiers on the Ukrainian front who post on the platform, so that the analysis may have been subject to some biases), informative content of various kinds (news reports and comments on them), ironic or activist-intentioned videos, often associated with messages of peace or protest. The videos related to war published on TikTok make extensive use of the tools provided by the infrastructure to stimulate interaction with the content (the so-called ‘affordances’): primarily background music, but also filters and stickers, to create content that fits with the engaging and fast-paced logic that characterizes the platform. Together, these types of videos tend towards a normalization of war, following two main narrative strands: the idea of war as the ‘new everyday’ and the spectacularization of armed conflict.
In the former case, the ‘everydayization’ of war is associated with the fact that TikTok is still primarily a platform on which the everyday lives of users are showcased. This aspect was evident in many of the videos analyzed, in which life on the front line was represented with simple gestures and movements, in which everyone could recognize themselves. Most of the published videos immortalized soldiers, in uniform and with weapons at hand, engaged in a series of ordinary activities and in a generally cheerful atmosphere of camaraderie.
In one of the most representative videos, a soldier is seen taking measurements, sawing pieces of wood, nailing them together, and finally erecting a small sign on which "checkpoint for cats” is written in Ukrainian. The final scene shows cats coming out of the trench opening. Content like this shows life beyond (and despite) war, whose menacing presence, however, always remains perceptible in the background with buildings reduced to rubble. These contents signal a space for resistance and the manifestation of humanity despite the absurdity of the conflict, while the stubborn repetition of the banalities of everyday gestures highlights, by contrast, the absurdity of life in war.
In the latter case, the spectacularization consists of videos with images of planes, tanks, explosions, fires, and the destruction of buildings. Here, the human and corporeal aspect of war disappears, and the attention is entirely focused on the technical side of combat. War becomes the destruction of ‘objects’ and ‘targets’ rather than violence against bodies and living beings. These are videos with computer-generated musical accompaniment simulating the noise of weapons – more or less real – destroying enemy targets; the style is reminiscent of video games and action movies, with a neo-futuristic fascination with weapons and war machines, where destructive power is an end in itself.
A close, concrete, possible war
By subjecting some of these videos to focus groups consisting of final-year high-school students in the Milan area, it emerged that although TikTok is widely used, it is not considered among the platforms deemed reliable for information on war. Many participants made critical comments regarding the more ironic videos – which associated war images with music or dancing – accusing them of trivializing and minimizing the tragedy of the conflict. Others denounced the crudest videos, because they did not serve to sensitize people but instead produced a trivialization of violence.
Beyond this distrust, from the dialogue with the young people surveyed there emerged a growing familiarization with war, a scenario no longer considered as a remote and implausible possibility for their future. Some believed that a conflict directly involving all of Europe was almost inevitable and that it would affect them and force them to make difficult choices. For this reason, TikTok seems to have an ambivalent role in producing a normalization of war among young people, so that the domestication of fear also entails a decrease in the sense of repulsion towards war.
