PRACTICAL DIGITAL LITERACY: YOUTHS¿ PRACTICAL MASTERY OF PLATFORM EXPERIENCES

Contemporary digital environments are increasingly shaped by algorithmic recommender systems that curate the content experienced by young people on social media platforms. Despite a wealth of research on digital literacy, existing frameworks tend to adopt either top-down, skill-based approaches tied to economic and civic imperatives or bottom-up perspectives grounded in lived cultural practices. This dissertation argues that current understanding of digital competencies inadequately accounts for the tacit, collectively developed, and sociotechnically embedded knowledge that teenagers cultivate through contemporary platform engagement. To address this gap, the study introduces the concept of practical digital literacy, that is, a multidimensional practical mastery conceptualised through Pierre Bourduey’s theory of practice. Such knowledge comprises three interrelated dimensions: shared, dispositional, and structured. The research investigates these dimensions through two complementary fieldworks. The first involved 719 upper-secondary students across nine schools in northern Italy, combining class-level group interviews with a survey analysed through Multiple Correspondence Analysis. The second comprised a computational ethnography of TikTok, examining 60 algorithmically recommended videos and over 26,000 user comments through word embeddings, dimensionality reduction visualisations, and semantic analysis based on dependency parse trees. Findings reveal that teenagers develop practical digital literacy collectively, through peer-mediated processes of platform socialisation rather than through isolated skill acquisition. Young people engage with algorithmic flows via what I refer to as algorithmic standouts, namely content that breaks through the recommendation stream, and algorithmic copiloting, which are tactical, reflexive practices through which users co-shape recommendation outputs. The dispositional analysis shows that social media consumption is structured primarily along axes of gendered identity performance, cultural engagement, and modes of participation, with parental capital exerting surprisingly limited influence. The TikTok fieldworker further demonstrates that algorithmic feeds and comment sections co-produce gendered cultural environments, reproducing and at times bridging gender binaries through iterative human-algorithm interaction. These findings contribute to digital literacy studies by foregrounding the sociotechnical, peer-driven, and dispositonal nature of young people’s platform competencies, with implications for pedagogical practice and media education policy.