Divon, T., & Eriksson Krutrök, M. (2024). Playful trauma: TikTok creators and the use of the platformed body in times of war. Social Media + Society, 10(3), 20563051241269281.

Link: https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051241269281

Open access: Yes

Notes: As we increasingly live in a platformed world, it is not surprising that our encounters with war and violence are ever more mediated by the affordances and cultures of digital sites. For instance, we process trauma in and through platforms such as TikTok. To explore this, Divon and Moa examine TikTok creators in the Ukranian context, analyzing videos through a digital ethnographic approach. To set their analysis, the authors offer a valuable lens to grasp the complex experiences of those mediating cultural trauma related to war through TikTok: playful trauma: “a framework to untangle the complex junction where platforms, bodies, and personal and collective adversities converge” (p. 11). Through this lens, Divon and Moa note the use of playful POV aesthetics, dance challenges, and dialogues among content creators. In their paper, the authors not only propose but demonstrate the value of lenses that recognize the complex and fluid positioning of the body when counterposed to platforms’ affordance and cultures—especially in contexts of violence. Here, they note: “We define playful trauma as the counterintuitive embodied performance of cultural or personal adversities through digital dialects on platforms, where trauma is artfully juxtaposed with the mundane. It is a dynamic practice where platforms, bodies, and trauma converge, offering creators infrastructural pathways to translate their personal and collective grief, struggle, and resilience into playful platform vernaculars, utilizing these spaces as coping mechanisms” (p. 5).

Abstract: Amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine, TikTok has emerged as a pivotal platform, where creators utilize its compressed video formats to mediate the harsh realities of war zones. In this article, we examine 97 videos produced by 12 Ukrainian and Russian TikTok creators in response to the 2022 war in Ukraine. We focus on the playful embodiment of trauma using digital ethnography, analyzing creators’ practices and their interconnected memetic communication on TikTok. We identified the use of play through three dynamic practices where platforms, bodies, and trauma converge: (1) the utilization of POV (point-of-view) aesthetic in shareable templates to convey the realities of war from engaging first-person perspectives; (2) the incorporation of dance as a means of embodied creative expression and amplification of trauma; and (3) the harnessing of platform features to facilitate whimsical dialogues with followers about life under war. We argue that playfulness is entrenched in and enacted through platform vernacular modes, driving creators to forge communal ties during adversities and shape the ongoing representation of trauma and its accelerated visibility in digital spaces. We present the concept of playful trauma as a framework for understanding the structural dissonance that arises when creators utilize their bodies alongside platform-specific humorous, ironic, or subversive dialects to perform and amplify the gravity of trauma. This tension provides a unique space for creators to convert their shared experiences of grief and resilience into participatory coping mechanisms. In doing so, they subject and harness their playful platformed body as both the medium and the message, documenting injustices, bearing witness, and galvanizing crowds into action during times of war.