Connected social media platforms as new generational (dis)orders: platform repertoires among the Slovenian youth

The media repertoire model, with its attention to everyday media use and social and communicative figurations, is valuable for understanding how biographical events might influence media use. Some of the more recent research on young audiences’ media repertoires suggests that the technological specificity and uses of a medium are not as important for understanding young audiences as conceptualising digital media as an integrated communicative environment. At the same time, research confirms that young people do not assign media to specific functions, but use platforms multifunctionally, especially as they get older (Wimmer & Wurm, 2021). As young people begin to develop their media habits in early adolescence (Buckingham, 2000; Marchi, 2012; Russo & Stattin, 2017), understanding their media preferences at a broader level and within specific social contexts can also explain an anticipation of their future media habits (LaRose, 2010; Peil & Spaviero, 2017). Some studies show that the development of information media resembles a patchwork process in which not only peer groups but also family and school environments are important contextual factors. However, media repertoires as individually constructed media constellations are not fixed and unchangeable formations. But even within the generationally narrow younger media audiences, some young people manifest their own significant preferences in ways that may confirm the process of social ordering through the expressed media choices in the context of their everyday life.

With the above theoretical considerations in mind, the paper aims to critically examine how the diversity of young people’s media choices, on the one hand, and specific communication, cultural and social choices, on the other, construct some new patterns of relatively stable and distinctive media repertoires among young people. In its search for answers, the paper refers to the results of an intensive quantitative study of media repertoires, based on a quantitative survey of a sample of more than 3000 young people aged 12 to 19, conducted in spring 2022. First, the five dominant categories of social media platform preferences are presented, which nicely confirm how some media platform uses go well together and exclude other forms of use: while some social media users are primarily viewers, others are heavy communicators, content creators or intensive players. At a descriptive level, such an analysis extracts the individual elements of media devices, communication patterns and also their content, as well as the contextual backgrounds of everyday circumstances through which such internal differences emerge between an otherwise fairly homogeneous group of young people and their ‘social platform repertoires’.

According to our findings, gender, news media practices, attitudes towards books and reading, and active sports participation seem to be the most important differentiating factors that play a role in creating new social boundaries within the teenage groups. Such findings challenge the current understanding of social platforms as general social infrastructures (Bucher 2020) and also help to identify the dominant social and cultural factors that emerge as important generational differences beyond media repertoires as such.