Abstract
My technical project and STS thesis are motivated by the sociotechnical issue of social media’s impact on adolescent mental health. As an increasingly relevant and concerning issue, it is imperative that action be taken to combat it and protect our youth. Through my team’s technical project, we targeted a specific aspect of mental health: loneliness, by co-designing a digital intervention to promote healthier social media use. This work was informed by, and completed alongside, input from a team of psychology undergraduates and a youth advisory board (YAB) comprising five high school students. The resulting product was an interactive front-end prototype of the application centered on a “friendship garden” metaphor, in which peer connections are represented as entities that grow through shared in-person activities. Such promotion of meaningful social engagement serves to counteract the digital isolation experienced by many of today’s youth. Motivated by an alternative perspective on mental health, my STS thesis explores ideas of adolescent violence perceptions by analyzing TikTok’s detective culture. Detective culture is a TikTok subculture that involves discussing and analyzing publicized crimes, often with the intent to aid in or solve these cases. The nature of these posts is often very violent and dramatized in an effort to capture audience attention, raising concerns about the desensitization and normalization of such violence among young viewers. Together, these projects raise awareness of various aspects of social media’s mental health impacts and take action to address these concerns.
While online platforms can support well-being by strengthening meaningful relationships, they may also be detrimental when they displace in-person interaction. My technical project addresses this challenge through the co-design of a digital intervention to promote face-to-face social engagement among adolescents. Building on a youth-generated concept developed during a hackathon, my team applied systems analysis and user-centered design processes—including goal definition, generation and evaluation of alternatives, and iterative prototyping—to translate an early-stage idea into a minimum viable system. A targeted review of prior digital and behavioral interventions informed the design, grounding it in behavioral activation, self-determination theory, and social support theory, and identifying key behavioral targets for sustaining friendships: initiation, follow-through, and relationship deepening. These insights guided the development of core system features centered on the “friendship garden” metaphor. The prototype was iteratively refined through wireframing and feedback from the YAB and is designed to support intentional interaction, shared accountability, and sustained relationship maintenance. Ongoing work includes a feasibility and user experience study with adolescents (target n=10) to evaluate usability, engagement, and the potential to reduce loneliness. Ultimately, this work contributes a theoretically grounded, co-designed digital intervention and offers design insights to promote offline social connection through technology.
My STS thesis argues that TikTok’s detective culture portrays violence as entertainment, encouraging participatory crime analysis and speculation, and raising concerns about desensitization and the normalization of violence among adolescents. Detective culture itself is rooted in the long history of true-crime media; however, this modern form makes such content readily available to younger audiences and allows for a more engaging experience. The associated study involved a content analysis of viral TikTok videos associated with detective culture and a literature-based interpretation of emerging trends from the perspective of youth exposure to and perceptions of violence. My analysis revealed that TikTok detectives often leverage ‘puzzle piece’ evidence presentation, personal speculation, suspenseful storytelling, and viewer engagement and collaboration in comment sections. Through a literature-based lens, these findings suggest that detective culture engages adolescents via its puzzling, suspenseful, and collaborative nature, influencing how they perceive the severity and tolerance of violence in their own lives.
The simultaneous execution of these two projects significantly aided my understanding of their sociotechnical intersection. While the relationship between social media and mental health is complex and multifaceted, the work presented here narrows the scope to two specific examples from each side of that relationship: TikTok and loneliness. My technical project observes how TikTok, as a social media platform, contributes to this issue, while my STS thesis acknowledges loneliness as a mental health consequence. Taking on both perspectives at the same time gave me a more holistic view of the broader sociotechnical issue while maintaining the feasibility of each project. Through both studies I conducted for these projects, I was able to apply some of the associated scholarship and findings to the alternative project. For example, literature that informed my team’s digital intervention supported my interpretation of the psychological risks of detective culture and the variables that I included in my analysis. Conversely, lessons learned from how TikTok has failed to protect against these risks informed some of the safety precautions implemented in our intervention. While this work provides insights into the realities of social media and efforts to address its shortcomings, many issues remain to be acknowledged and uncovered. So long as social media retains its dominant presence in the lives of youth, ongoing efforts to improve its safety, design, and impact will be essential.
