Alina Shitrit
Talk recording
Values in Adolescent Media: From Paper to Pixel
Existing research on social media influencers has focused on marketing and commercialization. We focus on understanding influencers as role models for ways of life. What values do adolescents encounter through the media they consume? And as platforms evolve from print magazines to TikTok, have these values fundamentally changed?
To investigate this, we developed a two-step Gemini-based system: first converting videos to text, then annotating value expressions. This approach achieved the best performance on a dataset of 1,000 manually annotated TikToks. Are the values expressed on TikTok differ or continue a longer trajectory in adolescent magazines?
In this hands-on workshop, participants will:
- Learn the theoretical foundations of values research (using Schwartz's Theory of human values)
- Experience our annotation process by coding pages from high-circulation adolescent magazines spanning the 1990s to present
- Explore preliminary findings comparing value expressions across platforms (magazines vs. TikTok) and time periods
- Discuss what these patterns reveal about media influence on adolescent development
This research-in-progress offers network scientists an interdisciplinary lens for examining how values are communicated across media ecosystems to adolescence - from paper to pixel.
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