Date on Master's Thesis/Doctoral Dissertation

5-2025

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph. D.

Department

English

Degree Program

English Rhetoric and Composition, PhD

Committee Chair

Olinger, Andrea

Committee Member

Williams, Bronwyn

Committee Member

Mattes, Mark

Committee Member

Buck, Amber

Author's Keywords

critical digital literacy; literacy studies; social media; algorithm

Abstract

This project explores undergraduate students’ digital literacy practices and algorithmic beliefs and awareness on algorithmically driven social media platforms like the TikTok For You Page (FYP). TikTok is a very successful social media platform with over 135 million users in the U.S. alone, nearly half of the U.S. population (Statista, 2025a). Central to TikTok’s popularity and success is its unique technological infrastructure, specifically the underlying algorithm of the FYP that shapes user experience. With a mixed-methods approach, I utilize survey data and text-based interviews (Prior, 2004) to examine participants’ experiences on the TikTok FYP. Drawing on a technofeminist methodology (Wacjman, 2005; Blair, 2012; Almjeld, 2019) to prioritize participants’ lived experiences and consider broader power structures shaping their FYPs, I critically examine and unpack the complex relationship between social media users and the TikTok FYP algorithm. My research demonstrates that participants often hold partial, speculative, or even conspiratorial beliefs and understandings of how the FYP algorithm functions, but these beliefs nonetheless play a central role in how they engage with the platform. Utilizing critical digital literacy (Hutchinson & Novotny, 2021) as a framework to study users’ experiences on the TikTok FYP, I examine participants’ practices and beliefs to highlight how their interactions with the platform are shaped not only by the algorithm but also by their perceptions of it. Ultimately, I argue that users’ digital literacy practices and algorithmic beliefs and awareness develop together, constantly informing and reshaping one another through extended use of the TikTok FYP. Algorithms are both ubiquitous and pervasive, often operating beneath the surface of everyday digital experiences, and that invisibility makes them even more important to understand. This research demonstrates the need to critically examine how users make sense of algorithms and respond to hyper-personalized content. As social media platforms increasingly mediate access to information and entertainment, studying how literacy practices and algorithmic beliefs develop together reveals how users navigate digital platforms and negotiate issues of agency, privacy, and power.

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