#GenZ on TikTok: the collective online self-Portrait of the social media generation

In contrast to academic and popular accounts that present generational characteristics from the outside, in a top-down manner, we explore how Gen Z constructs, narrates, and projects itself in real-time on TikTok—a prominent social media platform, dominated by Gen Z, that provides a valuable window into youth experience and cultural production. Based on a thematic analysis of 1918 public videos tagged #GenZ, as well as salient comments posted on these videos, we aim to explore inductively how Gen Z collectively portrays itself on TikTok. Our findings illustrate how, via creative processes of both internal and external self-definition, Gen Z portrays itself as a generation of contrasts: powerful and self-assured, yet vulnerable and damaged. Videos embrace a playful self-reflexivity about time that embodies Gen Z’s self-awareness, sense of unity, and collective spirit. This research contributes to our understanding of both generational identity and youth social media participation; sitting at the intersection of these two bodies of knowledge, it facilitates a nuanced understanding of youth self-representation, online collective expression, and multimodal communication practices on a critically understudied social media platform.