ABSTRACT
TikTok, K-pop, and digital television, all peaking during the COVID-19 pandemic, offer scholars of children and youth media, the opportunity to pursue new lines of inquiry in global media culture and childhood, and strengthen the integration of research across broadcast media and digital technologies in the era of globalization. This chapter uses the current moment of user-generated media and direct-to-fan strategies of synergistic global partnerships to provide a sweeping assessment of dominant approaches and urge new directions in the field. The chapter reiterates the importance of the grounded study to understand active entanglements of youth, strategic interconnectedness of their multiple modalities of media engagement, soft and hard skills in content production and delivery, use of peers as experts, and influence of peers in content creation, framing, and integration. Explorations of subjective agency, of inscribed consumer-producer positions across broadcast and digital platforms, should be extended to empirical analyses of how networks of trust are formed, how risks to privacy and self are assessed, how defense mechanisms are constructed, and deployed, and how peer experts are constituted.
