Abstract
Media entertainment today extends beyond conventional formats like TV shows, music, films, video games, and books to include social media content. This article explores how teens integrate conventional and social media entertainment into their media repertoires, and how they reflect on the interrelations of different media in the context of their daily lives. Using Q-methodology and qualitative interviews, three entertainment repertoires are identified: legacy-oriented, gaming-oriented, and social media entertainment-oriented. Findings reveal that while teens across these repertoires have similar experiences of conventional media entertainment and social media entertainment, they differ in how they portray the value of these. The analysis further demonstrates the complementary nature of various forms of media entertainment. The interweaving functions of entertainment media relate to how content flows between different forms of media, and to how different media are entangled into daily life.
Keywords
Introduction
What is media entertainment for youth? Alongside conventional forms of entertainment like TV shows, music, films, video games, and books, it includes content on social media. For most youth, what Cunningham and Craig (2019) term “social media entertainment” is a taken-for-granted part of everyday life and culture. Youth have grown up alongside an emerging industry of content creators who rely on the infrastructures of social media platforms to produce a wide range of entertainment.
Sonia Livingstone (2002) proposed that new media rarely replace older media, but rather that they complement and increase the available options for youth. Moreover, people in their late teens tend to become more diverse and specialized in their use of media, and she noted how we are witnessing a development where media “provide the resources for diverse, perhaps even fragmented, forms of identification” (Livingstone, 2002: 109). While recent works also find that children and teens tend to combine (rather than replace) “old” with “new” media (Hasebrink and Paus-Hasebrink, 2022), surprisingly few studies have been conducted on what youth make of increased media entertainment options, or how social media entertainment complements or replaces other forms of media entertainment. Instead, the prominent position of social media in youth lives has spurred substantial research about their potential ramifications. Numerous studies examine how platforms play into young people’s social life (for a review, see Dredge and Schreurs, 2020) or their potential detrimental associations with youth mental health (for a review, see Abi-Jaoude et al., 2020). Others have addressed social media as sites for entertainment, for example by exploring young people’s perceptions of relations with content creators and influencers (Mahrt and Bock, 2021; Marôpo et al., 2020; Martínez and Olsson, 2019; Tolbert and Drogos, 2019). Audience-studies about TikTok are relevant for understanding how platforms operate as entertainment media, by accentuating perceptions of tailored and dynamic feeds that respond to user behavior, thus mirroring individual interests and preferences (see, for example, Bhandari and Bimo, 2022; Lee et al., 2022; Schellewald, 2022).
What is currently lacking are studies that holistically explore how people turn to social media, legacy media, and digital media entrants (like Netflix) for entertainment. Cross-media studies of people’s use of news are commonplace (see, for example, Peters et al., 2022; Swart et al., 2017), though while most people spend more time on non-news related content, cross-media approaches of people’s entertainment experiences are uncommon. For teens, especially, media entertainment constitutes a substantial part of life and connects to developing a sense of self and place in the world (Livingstone, 2007; Willis, 1990). Understanding their perspectives is therefore necessary. This article thus centers on how teens reflect upon their media entertainment practices and explores if and how social media entertainment complements or replaces conventional forms of media entertainment.
I proceed by presenting a cultural-studies-informed cross-media approach to studying media entertainment experiences before introducing my research questions. Based upon an interview study of 24 teens, I show how their media entertainment repertoires reflect content from a variety of media and platforms, but also how repertoires are differently configured regarding leaning toward conventional media entertainment, gaming and gaming-related content, or social media content. I argue that the experiential meaningfulness of entertainment media partly relates to their complementary and interweaving functions.
A cross-media approach to studying entertainment media
Studies increasingly emphasize the need to de-center media and start from the perspective of individual users in understanding media experiences (Couldry, 2011; Hasebrink and Paus-Hasebrink, 2022; Lomborg and Mortensen, 2017; Ytre-Arne, 2023). This entails understanding how audiences combine and move between different media, and how such cross-media experiences become routinised and meaningful components of life. Rather than studying audience reception of a singular medium or text, cross-media approaches seek to understand the interrelations between different media that an individual has habituated as part of daily life (Hasebrink and Domeyer, 2012). Cross-media approaches are arguably especially relevant for understanding teen media practices—considering the amount of time teens spend on and in media and how they combine different “old” and “new” media into their personal media repertoire (Hasebrink and Paus-Hasebrink, 2022: 45–46).
In a world of media abundance and choice, habituated patterns of media use—or repertoires of preferred media—become a necessity (Hasebrink and Popp, 2006; Taneja et al., 2012; Webster and Ksiazek, 2012). Media repertoires are as such understood to alleviate challenges with abundance in high-choice media landscapes. From the entire body of available media, people build up a repertoire of media that they integrate into their routine practices (Peters and Schrøder, 2018: 1082). A cross-media repertoire-oriented approach thus starts from the perspective of the individual, considers the variety of media used, and how the components of a repertoire are composed, related, and structured (Hasebrink and Domeyer, 2012; Hasebrink and Hepp, 2017; Peters and Schrøder, 2018). Analytically, the objective moves beyond mapping the types of media a person relies on, aiming to uncover how media use and experiences constitute meaningful practices (Hasebrink and Domeyer, 2012; Ytre-Arne, 2023).
This article is about media entertainment and how youth reflect upon platforms, media, and content they consider central in the context of their daily lives. The way I conceive of entertainment and popular culture as part of everyday life, and as important beyond “passing time” or “having fun,” is informed by cultural and audience studies (Bird, 2003; Peters, 2003; Williams, 1958; Willis, 1990). Peters’ (2003) essay on Raymond Williams’ (1958) seminal Culture and Society foregrounds how entertainment represents “imagining and enacting social worlds,” and how what may at first seem silly, escapist, and shallow also offers potential for social connection (Peters, 2003: 222). However, uncovering what entertainment means and represents requires “unseeing” people as masses (Williams, 1958: 319–332). The works of Williams and cultural studies accentuate the scholarly relevance of studying “common culture” and how audiences actively interpret and produce meaning in their encounters with media texts (Peters, 2003). Both aspects are prominently featured, for example, in Willis’ (1990) account of how culture and media are employed as raw materials for young people’s own symbolic work, “through which they understand themselves and their possibilities for the rest of their lives” (p. 7). A cultural-studies-informed cross-media approach opens possibilities for understanding why teens turn to different kinds of entertainment and for understanding the roles and interrelations between media. It also enables exploring and understanding “the range of trajectories across the media manifold that people take” (Couldry, 2011: 224).
Thus far, I have alluded to a development toward increasing choice and options to tailor media practices to one’s preferences. Audience agency, however, is relational, meaning that the choices people make are at least partially informed by context and social structures. As noted by Hasebrink and Hepp (2017: 366), “people do not just act individually; typically, they act in relation to certain ‘domains’ of the social world that they are involved in.” People’s lifeworld may, thus, partly influence their media repertoires. Peters and Schrøder (2018: 1082) relatedly point to how there are always larger institutional, cultural, and social contexts that prefigure how types of media and content are integrated into routine practices of media use. It follows that questions of aesthetic appraisals and valuations of media and content are also situationally and contextually contingent: “culture” is not a value-free term (Bird, 2003: 120).
Furthermore, a large body of research presents audience choice and agency in the era of datafication as constrained or even illusory, positing that streaming media and social media platforms exert substantial power over audiences. Beer (2013: 96) argues that algorithmic recommendations make decisions on behalf of people and thus delimit the range of content people encounter. Others similarly conceive of algorithms as gatekeepers (Soffer, 2021) or contend that algorithmic and editorial curation on music streaming platforms controls what music people listen to (Bonini and Gandini, 2019). Along the same lines, some argue that video-on-demand services like Netflix rhetorically position viewers as empowered while in practice governing the construction of taste (Gaw, 2022) and circumscribing user agency (Van Esler, 2021). With such accounts in mind, studying the everyday (media) lives of people, (as diverse rather than a “mass”) and the ways audiences experience media can be framed as fundamentally needed to counterbalance a tendency for media scholars to reassert “monolithic accounts of power that tend to downplay or exclude audiences and the significance of the lifeworld” (Livingstone, 2019: 171). Service features and recommendations are not the only resources that inform audiences about what to watch (Johnson et al., 2024); studying how people combine and move between media means considering how there are other potential sources of influence beyond algorithmic or platform-editorial recommendations.
This is not to say that media and platforms are powerless. What is required is a non-binary understanding of agency that recognizes how power operates in and between media and audiences. Rather than locating power as residing with audiences or media, or platforms, this approach attends to the hegemonic power and commercial structures of media systems while also acknowledging audiences as capable of interpreting and creating relations with media texts (Gurevitch and Scannell, 2003; Hall, 1999 [1973]; Peters, 2003). Audiences are active and creative, but also “constrained by the boundaries placed around the meaning of those media products, and by the choices that are actually available to us” (Bird, 2003: 167). Bird’s study of how people interact with a variety of media portrays the integral role of media in everyday culture, the spectrum of engagement between casual media use and moments of fandom, and the interpretations and negotiations at play in encounters with media texts—without losing sight of the power of corporate and commercial media producers in shaping media cultures.
Aims and research questions
Grounded in a cultural-studies-informed cross-media approach to studying media entertainment experiences and aligned with the aim of exploring if and how social media entertainment complements or replaces conventional forms of media entertainment, I pursue the following two sub-aims: First, I analyze how teens incorporate both conventional media entertainment and social media entertainment into their media repertoires, and I ask if and how repertoires differ between teens. Beyond mapping what types of media teens appreciate, this part of the analysis addresses how teens differ and align in their aesthetic appraisals and valuations of forms of media entertainment. Second, I examine how teens reflect on the meanings, functions, and interrelations of different media in their daily life contexts, including how they find their way to cultural works that appeal to them.
Method and data
This study employed a qualitative approach, combining interviews with Q methodology (Peters et al., 2022; Watts and Stenner, 2012). Twenty-four participants, aged 15–19, were recruited by contacting teachers in Oslo and Bergen (see Table 1 for an overview of anonymized participants). In some schools, project researchers visited a class to distribute information letters about the study. In other schools, teachers distributed information letters to their students. In all cases, interested individuals contacted the project directly to participate. The interviews were conducted during the participants’ leisure time, taking place between March and October 2022. Sessions lasted between 70 and 90 minutes and were organized according to the participants’ preferences, either online via Zoom or offline. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and coded using NVivo.
Overview of anonymized study participants.
Olivia referred to her dad as African without specifying further. Class background of parents approximated from what participants knew about education and profession of their parents (based on Hansen et al., 2009).
I used Q methodology to systematize and analyze cross-media entertainment patterns among youth, similar to how Peters et al. (2022) used Q methodology to investigate the news repertoires of Danish youth and young adults. Q methodology combines qualitative research with quantitative analysis and is a technique for systematically discerning people’s points of view on a subject matter (Watts and Stenner, 2012)—in this case their reflections on different forms of media entertainment. The aim is not to extrapolate findings to a larger population but to understand the patterns of perspectives within a group. To do so, Q methodology interviews include an activity where participants rank a sample of items according to a subjective viewpoint (see Figure 1).
Example of how Alexander (16) sorted the cards (translated from Norwegian to English).
Card-sorting task (Q sample) and interviews
The first and longest part of the interviews was structured around the item-sorting exercise. Participants were given 30 cards (items) at the start of the interview and were asked to place them, one at a time, on a roughly normally distributed nine-column grid. The left end of the grid represented media, platforms, and content they considered least important as entertainment, while the right end represented those they considered most important (Figure 1). Participants hence sorted the cards on a nine-point scale ranging from −4 (least important) to +4 (most important). For media, platforms, and content that were ranked highly, participants were asked probing questions—for example, about why these were important, what types of content they liked and valued (and why), how these media and platforms fit into their daily lives, and how they came across content and cultural works. In the second part of the interviews, participants were asked additional questions—for example, about content creators and influencers, algorithmic recommendations, and how media use is influenced by friends and peers.
A key element of Q methodology is to develop items that are pertinent for the research question and that are representative of the diverse perspectives within the domain of interest (Watts and Stenner, 2012). For this study, 30 items were included to reflect common forms of media, platforms, and content among Norwegian teens, covering both conventional media entertainment and social media entertainment:
Nine social media platforms: YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Twitch, Discord, and Reddit.
Nine items related to social media content and content creators: fashion and/or beauty; workout and/or fitness; comedy/humor; YouTubers; gamers on YouTube/other platforms; other content; memes; watch others livestream; watch others play and comment video games (let’s play, walkthroughs).
Six items for TV streaming services and TV show genres: global TV streaming services; Norwegian TV streaming services; TV series, films; documentaries; reality shows; sitcoms, satire, comedy shows.
Six items for other media: play video games, music/music-streaming services, cinema, podcasts/radio, books, and one open card).
The items hence cover two broad areas of entertainment: social media entertainment and conventional forms of media entertainment (including playing video games and media streaming services). While these pre-defined items limited the openness of the approach, the interviews indicated that they comprehensively included what participants considered relevant for their media entertainment experiences. “Entertainment” was not defined for the participants beyond how the items themselves exemplified forms of media entertainment.
Entertainment repertoires: data analysis
The first step of the analysis explores how the entertainment repertoires reflect conventional forms of entertainment (such as TV shows, music, books, gaming) and social media entertainment, and the extent to which and how repertoires differ between teens. Evidently, none of the participants ranked the cards in the same way, and this analysis is reductive, moving from 24 individual repertoires to a smaller number of aggregated repertoires. This is accomplished through Q methodology factor analysis, which aims to find clusters of participants who have sorted the items similarly. These aggregated repertoires are thus what Hasebrink and Hepp (2017: 366) consider “artificial” and “built on the basis of statistical criteria.”
More specifically, the 24 Q sorts were subjected to a by-person centroid factor analysis with Varimax rotation (Watts and Stenner, 2012: 99–100), using the open-source desktop application KADE (Banasick, 2019). A three-factor solution, which explains 61% of the variance, was retained. Twenty-three of the 24 Q sorts significantly loaded onto one of these three factors (see Table S1, Supplementary material). These three factors thus represent three aggregate-level entertainment repertoires. Table 2 summarizes key features of the three repertoires: their 12 most important forms of media entertainment; the participants associated with each repertoire; and characteristic reflections on the value of entertainment media.
Aggregated repertoires with most important entertainment items (4 = most important) and key characteristics.
Emil cross-loaded on gamers and legacy oriented (see Table S1 in Supplementary material). MSS = music streaming service(s). TSS = TV streaming service(s). SME = Social media entertainment.
The top 12 entertainment items for each repertoire reflect cards with a positive value (see Figure 1): two cards at the + 4 position, three cards at the + 3 position, three cards at the +2 position, and four cards at the +1 position. In Table 2, the number in brackets represents how an item is ranked in the factor array. A factor array is an exemplar Q sort for a factor, representing how a person who perfectly matches that factor would rank the items. Note that factor arrays, as single Q sorts, are imperfect approximations; few, if any, participants who load on a factor will have sorted all the cards exactly as that factor array indicates (Watts and Stenner, 2012).
Labels for the three repertoires (legacy-oriented, gaming-oriented, social media entertainment-oriented) were constructed by considering the complete factor arrays (see Table S2, Supplementary material) and analyzing what the participants conveyed in the interviews.
The repertoires share the prominent pattern that both conventional media entertainment and social media entertainment are included among those participants consider important. Moreover, some of the same media and platforms are among the most popular across all three repertoires. Thus, participants across the board share some general traits regarding media use: (1) Most participants (including legacy-oriented) have integrated platforms and social media entertainment into their lives and spend considerable time scrolling through their feeds. (2) Most participants (including gaming-oriented and social media entertainment-oriented) explain how music accompanies them throughout the day, and they like watching TV shows, primarily on global streaming services. Participants furthermore have comparable portrayals of how different forms of media fit into their daily lives.
These similarities are noteworthy and indicate that social media platforms do not and will not eradicate the place of conventional media entertainment in teen lives. There are, however, some differences between the three repertoires, which extend beyond simply leaning toward conventional media entertainment or social media entertainment. I will next briefly outline the three repertoires to further explain how teens differ and align in their appraisals of forms of media entertainment. I thereafter turn to how teens reflect on the functions and interrelations of different media, and how they find their ways to cultural works of their liking.
Aggregated repertoire 1: legacy-oriented
The 12 participants who loaded on this repertoire are all girls, most of whom come from upper-middle-class families. These participants attribute different roles and values to conventional forms of entertainment compared to social media entertainment; they seem informed by a mind-set where coherent and long-form stories are valued for their contrast to social media entertainment. They appreciate media experiences that require attention and concentration, where their investment in cultural consumption pays off. This is especially true for reading books. Nora describes reading as “an opportunity to keep engaged without losing attention. I love, love books; I’ve always read a lot.” Alma indicates how reading is considered “good for you”: Reading books calms me, and I don’t feel guilty, like if I’ve spent a lot of time reading, because I know it’s not healthy to spend too much time on the phone. But with books, it’s good for the mind, and that thing about entering a sort of bubble, a different world.
Comparable conceptions partly explain the experiential value of watching films and TV series, though with variations regarding perceived need to concentrate. Bella explains how “when you watch a series, you can really relax, compared to reading a book . . ., but with [TV series] you can totally relax, so it’s kind of really comfortable entertainment.” The point is how TV shows and films, unlike scrolling feeds, offer guilt-free forms of comfort and relaxation. Similar to participants associated with the other repertoires, they furthermore describe how some shows and films demand attention, while others can be left in the background. The latter also relates to the widespread practice of rewatching shows and the comfort derived from watching something familiar.
Aggregated repertoire 2: gaming-oriented
Many participants associated with the other repertoires explained that playing video games was more important when they were younger. Likewise, the four boys associated with this repertoire referred to how gaming used to be even more important. Although none of them ranked playing video games as most important, they have a personal history as gamers, from childhood through their teen years, and their social lives have been closely aligned with playing video games (see also Thorhauge and Gregersen, 2019): Playing has meant a lot really. It probably made me make some friends, people with the same interest that I talked to. And I learned English. The same with YouTube with these gamers. So, it’s taught me a lot of English and my understanding of things in general, like with Minecraft. Knowing how things work. (Alexander)
When Alexander mentions “things in general” and “knowing how things work,” this reflects his interest in computers (he built his own computer when he was 12) and programming (he teaches kids to code). Gaming-oriented participants seem accustomed to defending video games as a meaningful activity or emphasizing how they balance gaming with other activities: I’ve played a lot all my life. And it’s not something I think is stupid because I’ve done other things as well. I’ve gone hiking in the mountains and skiing and stuff, it’s going well at school . . .. It’s not like it’s taken my life. When I think about gaming, it’s just good memories really. (Emil)
A sense of loss can be attributed to how video games become less central in later teenage years. Arman, for example, refers to how he no longer plays as much: “I’m no longer the same person. Perhaps because I grew up or because my friends no longer play that much. We’re tired of it and don’t play as much as we used to . . .. It was good times.”
Aggregated repertoire 3: social media entertainment-oriented
This repertoire includes four girls and four boys—most of whom come from lower-middle-class and partly/skilled worker families. However, their slight preference for platforms and social media entertainment over conventional media entertainment does not seem to be about a lack of access to entertainment that has a price-tag. Moreover, their portrayals of how and why social media entertainment matters apply to most participants: social media are integrated into daily routines and social contexts and provide content that mirrors various combinations of interests, self-perceptions, values, and cultural leanings of the participants—“I’m on Snap all the time. To communicate with others, and then there are people who have different vlogs and stuff, and you can follow what they do during their days, so that’s interesting” (Oliva). They appreciate the sense of agency they perceive to have in controlling what types of content they encounter in their feeds, and they like how platforms combine predictability with variety and randomness: There are memes, a lot, music videos, I really like people who make their own music, or people who rank music and stuff. Talks about music. Football. Video games, like if there’s a new game few know of. TikTok gives it a platform to become big. And then there’s just random things that are beyond my control, but that can quite fun. (Magnus)
What sets these participants apart is how they seem less informed by societal discourses that ascribe low cultural value to scrolling feeds. For some, this stems from indifference to discussions of low/high cultural value, but for others, it is an act of cultural self-confidence. Magnus and Daw exemplify the latter by articulating appreciation of productions across cultural brow-levels, where social media entertainment, like conventional media entertainment, can offer (and be appreciated for) hedonic pleasure, complexity, introspection, and meaningfulness.
The interweaving functions of entertainment media in daily life
More than anything, the aggregated repertoires and interviews demonstrate the complementary importance of both conventional media entertainment and social media entertainment for all participants. In this part of the analysis, I turn to how participants reflect on the meanings, functions, and interrelations of different media within the context of their daily lives, including how they find their ways to cultural works they like. I begin by highlighting how the music they listen to, the TV shows they like, the books they turn to, and the games they play, reflect aspects of their social media feeds. Next, I turn to how different media are interwoven into everyday contexts and situations.
When asked how they discover music, TV shows, films, books or games, participants regularly refer to social media, where content about other media content abounds. Most participants explain that social media is one way they discover music. As Daw explains, “it can also be songs on TikTok, that are like, here’s a really great song, let me find it on Spotify, and I just add to this playlist I have, called TikTok songs.” Likewise, when asked how they choose what TV shows to watch, participants often mention TikTok, and to some extent YouTube. Aatif notes that he might “see a cool TV series on TikTok or a cool clip, and then I search for it later. I find it, watch an episode or two, and decide whether to continue watching.” Participants commonly explain how platforms supplement the role of friends in recommending shows. These rather prosaic depictions are important because they suggest limits to the influence streaming media exert over audiences. Exploring cross-media experiences demonstrates how multiple sources direct the paths participants take to content they like. Maria, for instance, responds that she might watch a show that catches her attention on streaming services, and “a lot from social media, like often on TikTok where they talk about shows. But also, from my friends because I always ask if they know of anything worth watching.”
For some, like Magnus and Bella, platforms are not just places where they discover shows and films they might enjoy; they also serve as geeky sites for conversations and recaps about cultural works they appreciate. Relatedly, watching let’s play videos or walkthroughs of video games reflects how participants watch games they play themselves, but also how this is a genre appreciated for its production value: It’s a bit like watching sports. I watch them because they’re good . . .. There’s this game called Rust. I was home sick for a week and had time to play it. It’s so time-consuming, so slow, but I find it really fun. And Welyn, Willjum and Blooprint are three YouTubers, who practically work with creating content for that game, which makes it cool to watch them. (Jonas)
Platforms thus facilitate loose communities of culturally compatible people, a feature that is also prominent in platform conversations about books. Not only do young readers turn to platforms for recommendations, but these videos can also help them strengthen their reader identities (Asplund et al., 2024).
I’ve just finished, hm, what is it called? It ends with us. I discovered it on TikTok actually. It made me want to read again, sort of, because all of a sudden, everyone started reading on TikTok, and I was like, right, but it’s actually fun to read. (Julie)
The interweaving functions of media relate to how content flows between different media—as discussed above—and how various media are entangled into the fabric of daily life. This speaks to the media-saturated lives of teens and foregrounds how teens incorporate different media into daily routines. Understanding why participants across all three aggregated repertoires turn to both conventional and social media entertainment involves comprehending how life and media configure each other. These life/media entanglements are different for social media entertainment, media content used for ambience, and coherent and long-form stories.
The ways in which smartphones facilitate a near-constant entryway to social media entertainment, perceived as malleable to individual preferences, constitute one mode of how media are entangled into daily life. This mode is reflected in the above portrayal of the social media entertainment-oriented repertoire: platforms are part of daily routines and social life, and represent customizable, controllable, and flexible sources of content reflecting whatever likes and preferences people have. This study thus largely echoes recent audience-studies on TikTok (Bhandari and Bimo, 2022; Lee et al., 2022; Schellewald, 2022) but extends these explanations to social media entertainment in general. For example, participants describe their experiences with social media platforms in ways that echo Schellewald’s (2022) analysis of how people purposefully engage with content on TikTok to enhance the accuracy and relevance of recommendations. Social media hence offer easily accessible spaces for pursuing individual interests, preferences, and values. They additionally offer content and formats that differ from conventional media entertainment: “There’s more variety on TikTok and Instagram because anyone can post stuff. Anyone can publish anything. But Netflix and TV2, that’s like major productions and so much work” (Bella).
The prominent position music and music streaming platforms hold among most participants reflects another mode of how daily life and media are intertwined: Music is very important; it’s a big part of everyday life. I take the train, so if I on my way to school, for example, I listen to music. When I’m working out, on my way home, when I’m going to the store. It’s sort of most often when I’m alone. And maybe if I’m gaming. Alone. I just listen to music. (Salman)
Salman’s depiction of being accompanied by music throughout the day is echoed by many participants who refer to the background or surrounding role of music. The high ranking of music among participants ties in with how compatible music-listening is with other activities. This is not to call into question their affection for music but rather to emphasize how music adds layers of “the right” ambiance to everyday situations. Participants also describe incorporating other media as a background or companion to daily life: some play YouTube videos while getting ready in the morning, or re-watch favorite TV shows while doing homework. Ida’s habit of rewatching Young Royals illustrates the latter: “I’ve almost memorized the lines, so I kind of don’t have to watch what they’re doing, . . ., so I do schoolwork or things.”
A third mode encompasses situations where engaging with content takes center stage, characterizing how participants portray attentive experiences such as reading books, watching a TV series or film, gaming, or listening to music. Because these modes of media consumption depend on immersion and concentration, they offer a type of enjoyment or appreciation unlike the fragmented experience typical of social media entertainment. For example, when Emil mentions series and films he likes, his appreciation of these works connects with certain quality-expectations: I finished Breaking Bad. I liked it. But it was very slow in the middle there, so I kind of gave up on it a bit. My dad showed me The Wire. I liked it a lot . . .. I don’t bother watching anything I don’t think is really good, you know. I’ve seen a bit of Peaky Blinders and such. I like Pulp Fiction a lot. You can’t always predict what’s going to happen in the movie . . .. Now that I’ve watched quite a lot, I notice a bit of . . . Is there a good script where the actors can portray their characters? If I notice it doesn’t work, I drop it. (Emil)
While social media—always available and capable of delivering content—may compete for the same time and attention, they do not seem to compare to what coherent, complex, or long-form pieces of cultural works offer. In short, different media matter differently and fit into life in complementary ways.
Discussion and conclusion
Given the prominent role of media entertainment in teens’ lives, particularly in terms of “time spent,” surprisingly few studies have used a repertoire approach to explore entertainment experiences. As this article demonstrates, a cross-media approach to entertainment contributes insights that often elude research on single-media experiences. Asking participants to reflect on what types of entertainment media are important to them brings forth how media use is situated within their lifeworld and illuminates the meanings and values arising from the interrelations between types of media (Hasebrink and Domeyer, 2012; Hasebrink and Hepp, 2017; Ytre-Arne, 2023).
This article first explored how teens include conventional media entertainment and social media entertainment into their media repertoires. The three aggregate-level repertoires share similarities, in that both conventional and social media entertainment are included among those teens consider most important. The repertoires nevertheless differ in leaning toward conventional or social media entertainment. Regarding if and how repertoires vary between teens, the analysis indicates differences based on gender and social class. The legacy-oriented repertoire includes only girls, most of whom belong to upper-middle-class families, while the gaming-oriented repertoire includes only boys. Social media entertainment-oriented participants are balanced in terms of gender, and most come from lower-middle-class and partly/skilled worker families. These gender differences are echoed in media use statistics from Norway (Bekkengen, 2024). Interviews also indicate gender-based differences in the types of content participants turn to. Although not covered in the analysis, these aspects merit further research.
The analysis hints at the potential relevance of social class: legacy-oriented participants appear guided by cultural codes that assign higher value to conventional media experiences, while social media entertainment-oriented participants tend to assess entertainment less in terms of high/low cultural value. This highlights how social and cultural context operate as structures influencing the types of media and content people turn to (Peters and Schrøder, 2018) and how these choices are shaped by cultural judgment (Bird, 2003). To reiterate, most legacy-oriented participants relied quite heavily on social media entertainment, but their upper-middle-class backgrounds might play into a predisposition to elevate narrative, long-form works of entertainment. In their study of smartphone attitudes, Fast et al. (2021: 74) similarly found that a “sense of digital unease corresponds with high volumes of cultural capital.”
In the second part of the analysis, I explored how teens reflect on the meanings, functions, and interrelations of different media within their daily lives, including how they find their ways to cultural works they enjoy. The analysis shows how content from legacy media and digital media entrants (like Netflix) operates as “raw material” for social media entertainment, which subsequently takes on an intermediary role in how teens find music, books, games, and TV shows of interest. This speaks to how no single actor holds monolithic power or agency in directing audiences to specific cultural works. Instead, the power to define what “circulates” resides in media, platforms, content creators, and audiences. My argument is that it is especially important to avoid considering audiences as a gullible and herdlike “mass” (Williams, 1958: 322) when faced with discourses about algorithmic power (Beer, 2013; Gaw, 2022). Platforms and media are not powerless, but critical analyses of media power become lopsided without the perspectives of audiences (Livingstone, 2019). Sure, participants rely on algorithmically curated feeds, but they also deliberately engage with content to optimize what they encounter (see also Lee et al., 2022). And while they often mention blockbuster series, films, video games, and novels, the cultural works they turn to (across media and platforms) also reflect narrow, geeky, and oddball preferences.
The ways in which content (about content) flows between platforms and media represent more than mere “sites for discovery.” Cross-media streams of culture cultivate and enhance an interest in or passion for specific media texts. In brief, the appreciation of a book, a video game, a TV show, or a piece of music is amplified by paratextual forms of engagement. This mirrors research on transmedia fandom (Bird, 2003; Sundet et al., 2021), and suggests that similar dynamics can be activated also in how audiences engage with certain cultural productions without necessarily identifying as fans.
The interweaving functions of media additionally relate to how life and media configure each other, that is, there is a time and space for different forms of entertainment media—or rather, entertainment experiences—this reflects how the same form of media content can fit different modes of media experiences. For instance, participants’ widespread appreciation of music reflects how they surround themselves with music, often as a background soundscape, but also how music-listening affords engagement and immersion. Thus, the connections between types of media and modes of media experience are not absolute. However, participants portray their use of social media entertainment in ways that suggest it offers experiences distinct from conventional media entertainment: they turn to social media for malleable content and for how its format fits into available moments of space and time in daily life.
This study offers a teen-perspective on how different entertainment media matter to them. Nonetheless, the study is limited to exploring Norwegian teens at one point in time. Cross-national studies could illuminate universal patterns as well as culturally specific nuances in media engagement. Media repertoires, moreover, might evolve over time (Peters and Schrøder, 2018; Ytre-Arne, 2023), as indicated by participants’ retrospective accounts of how gaming often diminishes in importance from tween through teen years. Future research could explore how repertoires evolve over time, and how these changes might reflect changes in whom teens see themselves being and becoming.
To conclude, this article argues for the complementary importance of conventional and social media entertainment for teens. By adopting a repertoire approach, the analysis reveals how teens navigate and prioritize forms of media to fulfill different functions in their daily lives. Ultimately, by attending to the interrelations between types of media, the findings underscore how the experiential meaningfulness of entertainment media partly relates to their complementary and interweaving functions.
Supplemental Material
sj-docx-1-nms-10.1177_14614448251338492 – Supplemental material for The interweaving functions of entertainment media: A cross-media study of Norwegian teens
Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-nms-10.1177_14614448251338492 for The interweaving functions of entertainment media: A cross-media study of Norwegian teens by Marika Lüders in New Media & Society
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This article is produced in association with the research project hosted by the University of Oslo, “GLOBAL NATIVES? Serving young audiences on new media platforms,” funded by the Research Council of Norway under Grant Number 315917.
Ethical approval and informed consent statement
Study participants were provided with written information about what the study entailed and how their data were processed and managed. They gave written, informed consent to participate. The study was assessed by Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research (reference number 305821) with the conclusion that the processing of personal data is lawful (legal basis: (1) Consent [GDPR art. 6 nr 1a] and (2) Explicit consent [GDPR art. 9 nr. 2a]).
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