Diary #02
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THE DESK THAT KEEPS COMING BACK
THE DESK THAT KEEPS COMING BACK
SCHOOLS
A search on TikTok Shop, a sequence of advertisements and a question: how much do we really choose what we see online?
LA STORIA
LA STORIA
It all begins with a desk.
A student searches for a product on TikTok Shop and comes across content about exactly what he wanted to find. Shortly afterwards, however, it seems to him that almost all the subsequent videos are about the same subject.
"I saw a desk on TikTok Shop and the following videos were only ads, only about desks" he writes in the questionnaire.
The first piece of content had been searched for deliberately. The subsequent sequence, however, seems repetitive and unwanted to him. The student identifies the initial content as an advertisement, attributes its production to a creator and interprets its purpose as commercial: to sell something.
His reaction is anger. He stops watching the content. However, he does not consider this type of advertising particularly influential on people's opinions or behaviour: in both cases, he answers "A little".
At the same time, he acknowledges that, in his digital habits, he "almost always" encounters content he has not searched for, especially in feeds. It is a phenomenon he says he notices often.
The boy does not change his mind following the episode: rather, he indicates that the experience reinforced something he already thought, without specifying which belief. Among the advice he gives his peers, finally, is to limit their time on social media.
BEYOND THE STORY
— From search to recommendation
BEYOND THE STORY
— From search to recommendation
Two different moments coexist in the account: the intentional search for a desk and the subsequent encounter with similar advertisements. The user's participation and the platform's content distribution choices are not the same thing.
Digital services and advertising systems can use multiple signals to select the content to display. In this case, however, we do not know which specific mechanism produced the sequence described by the student: we cannot attribute it with certainty to an algorithm or to the tracking of a single search.
The episode nevertheless allows us to observe an important difference: we can deliberately search for content without directly choosing everything that will appear afterwards. And we can also react to what is presented to us by deciding to stop watching it.
A QUESTION FOR YOU
A QUESTION FOR YOU
When we see many similar advertisements after a search, what clues can help us understand why they were shown to us?
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