Affinity spaces are the formation of a community often found in digital or online spaces where group members share identities, interests, or goals (Gee, 2004). Gee (2017) operationalizes affinity spaces as being “primarily defined by an affinity for solving certain sorts of problems. As such they always involve the development of certain sorts of skills” (p. 28). Gee’s (2004, 2017, 2018) work around affinity spaces have deeply informed other scholars within digital literacies to understand the influence, learning, and forming of identities through these online communities. Gee (2018) describes how classrooms and educators can learn from the exchanges in affinity spaces by mapping the various locations (physical and digital) and ways individuals interact with their interests by grounding examples from video gamers. Gee (2018) suggests extended offline activities (e.g., writing about their games, creating art, talking about gaming) are also a part of affinity spaces and developing identities. Leander and Boldt (2013) argue that literacies take shape beyond a textual product and how individuals form meaning as they engage in activities related to their interests. As Gee (2018) suggests, young people need access to these affinity spaces to explore their interests and deepen their understanding. Within affinity spaces, Gee (2018) offers that “people are fully engaged in helping each other to learn, act, and produce, regardless of their age, place of origin, formal credentials, or level of expertise” (p. 9). Individuals interact, engage, and extend their understanding of topics, interests, and passions through these spaces.

Beyond establishing a place of community, affinity spaces situate a hierarchical sense of membership where learning practices are exchanged within interest-based skills. Abrams and Lammers (2017) consider how affinity spaces provide a place of community due to the engagements, interactions, and exchanges between individuals. These spaces also provide belongingness for identity formation and align to components of communities of practice (Wenger, 1998). Lave and Wenger’s (1991) communities of practice situate identity and belongingness to a community on the degree to which an individual engages as an expert in the field. Additionally, Lave and Wenger (1991) suggest that hierarchies exist between those with and without expertise within communities of practice. Curwood’s (2013) study on Hunger Games fan-based online spaces (X/Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, and Facebook) highlights that these affinity spaces, although digital and distant, allow for more collaboration and interaction with others than printed text (Lankshear & Knobel, 2011). Through an ethnography approach, Curwood (2013) analyzed the digital literacy practices and participation within a community, finding that youth gravitated towards affinity spaces to express their identities (Curwood & Cowell, 2011) and develop and maintain essential relationships (boyd, 2008). As such, affinity spaces are just as much community-forming as identity-forming. As Curwood (2013) suggests, literacy practices within affinity spaces move beyond traditional forms of comprehension and critical analysis, including a wide range of digital literacies, collaboration, and composing. Within affinity spaces like those described by Curwood (2013), individuals engage in the space and learn about community values, which develop and enhance their identity formation.

Identity is how we see ourselves and how others view us. While some identities are fixed, such as race, culture, or gender, we can choose other identities based on upbringing, jobs, training, or personal interests (Gee, 2004). According to Gee and Hayes (2011), our identities are based on our discourses, which are embedded with social language and “integrates ways of talking, listening, writing, reading, acting, interacting, believing, valuing, and feeling…in the service of enacting socially situated identities and activities” (p. 111). In defining reading identity, school-related discourses often come to mind where particular actions, interactions, and habits indicate that someone is or is not identified as a reader. Cultural models of the skills, actions, and reactions within a discourse ultimately define our identities. As such, Gee (2000) suggests that these identities and discourses of being a “reader”, when they align with school-based discourses, impact the way a student acts, resonates, and understands language and literacy practices privileged by these academic spaces (p. 115). Therefore, the ways individuals view or think about a reading identity are often situated in the academic discourse of school-based reading and literacy practices. Reading identities frame how individuals see themselves and impact how they choose to carry out their identities whether in analog or digital spaces. Hall (2012) posits that students’ identities play a significant role in how students choose to think and discuss a text, suggesting that cognitive ability is irrelevant in determining a reader’s actions and reading strategies. This study notes that while reading identities can evolve through intentional environmental and social conditions, identities are often grounded in long-term developments and reinforcements from teachers, parents, and peers.

Extending Rosenblatt’s (1994/2019) theory of transactional reading, Thomas and Stornaiuolo (2016) offer restorying as a bending of texts using social media. Namely, restorying is a process for readers to reimagine and “reshape narratives to reflect better a diversity of perspectives and experiences [as] an act of asserting the importance of one’s existence in a world that tries to silence subaltern voices” (Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016, p. 314). For example, youth might recreate or respond to a text in a social media platform by using multimodalities to alter a characters’ racial background, historical placement, or geographic location as a mechanism to bring their identities and experiences into the textual interpretation. Young people respond to the texts they are reading and move the ownership and agency of texts into their own hands to shift the time, place, identity, mode, perspective, and metanarrative. For readers from historically marginalized identities (i.e., BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ readers), texts often exclude their backgrounds, narratives, and experiences. Thomas and Stornaiuolo (2016) note that young people are engaging in restorying to bend narratives through digital networks and affinity spaces within social media (i.e., Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok), taking up “new opportunities to connect, collaborate, and communicate, relationships between readers, authors, and texts” (p. 316). By reframing or bending the textual narratives, readers place their spin, which also situates notions of community.

Restorying reinforces many components of identity-forming actions (Bakhtin, 1981; Thomas & Stornaiuolo, 2016), which place the reader at the center of the textual interpretations, particularly within identities often left out, marginalized, or silenced. Additionally, the orientation of digital construction and reimagining exists as both learning and identity development (Engeness & Lund, 2020; Engeness, 2021). Thomas and Stornaiuolo (2016) state that “young people engaged in participatory culture produce individual and collaborative content as part of their everyday lives using a wide variety of multimodal tools to make meanings that are increasingly decentralized, crowdsourced, and situated in a multiplicity of contexts” (p. 318). This extends what Rowsell et al. (2019) describe as adolescents’ preferred interactions to interpret digital texts, seeing it less as a literal translation but engaging in remixing or reimagining to interpret deeper meaning.

Aligning within digital communities of practice are also “hacker literacies” (Santo, 2011), the sociotechnical engagements that are “empowered participatory practices, grounded in critical mindsets, which aim to resist, reconfigure, and/or reformulate the sociotechnical digital spaces and tools that mediate social, cultural, and political participation” (p. 2). In other words, the ways individuals engage in digital practices that shift or alter their original intent or purpose to build, bring together, and empower others. Santo (2011) describes the best example of hacker literacies as hashtags that have morphed specifically on platforms such as X/Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. Commonly used to identify or mark a group, keyword, or phrase, hashtags (#) are social identifiers that construct varying forms of meaning (Zappavigna, 2015). An example of this “hack” was in 2007, when Messina (2007) suggested the migration of using hashtags in Twitter (now X) as not just an identifier but as an organizing tool around important issues (Carvin, 2009; Gannes, 2010; Santo, 2011); as Santo (2011) argues, hashtags were never intended to be a social organizer. However, hashtag participation has rewritten how the X/Twitter platform is used for critical participation. In essence, hacker literacies align with how individuals may reframe digital tools to mobilize others, collectively building a community of shared interests and values. Although much of Santo’s (2011) work examines hacker literacies through social activism, the malleability of social media platforms and digital technologies as communicative and community formation tools warrants consideration for the content and material for marginalized identities.

TikTok is a short-form video social media app that has overtaken U.S. popular culture. Since 2018, users in the United States have created and interacted with three-second to three-minute-long videos, virtually engaged with followers, and developed digital communities based on interests, identities, and passions. The literacies within this digital platform exemplify how literacy is fostered by a community, constructed through video-based content, and consumed by users. The platform, structured by an algorithm, permits and limits how users, contributors, and the TikTok community view, use, and compose content. Boffone (2021) suggests that the way young people (particularly in Generation Z or those who were born between 1990 and 2010) choose to use and engage with social media spaces is indicative of the way “young people…view social media as a critical place to construct identities and form distinct youth subcultures” (p. 10). TikTok is more than just a dance app. It situates itself as a source of social or pop-culture currency for emerging communities and affinity spaces to exist based on interests, passions, and identities.

TikTok’s platform as a social media space permits interactions among and between users (Nichols & LeBlanc, 2020), and participation in the TikTok community relies on the algorithm’s personalization. Like many other social media platforms, TikTok emphasizes content curated for its users (Ruehlicke, 2020). However, TikTok’s platform is distinct in delivering content directly to users based on previous activity and learned user behavior (Ruehlicke, 2020). TikTok is unlike other social digital platforms like X/Twitter, Snapchat, or Facebook, where users are the primary agents for seeking, finding, and selecting their community, content, and followers. TikTok’s technical platform structure aligns with the techno-skeptical constructs described by Nichols and LeBlanc (2020), who argue that platforms inherently and intentionally bring individuals and interests together, highlighting that “all of these activities are intimately bound up with digital relations that are not always immediately visible to us” (p. 107). In this way, TikTok’s algorithm mutually connects and segregates users into concrete categories or communities without user manipulation. Ruehlicke (2020) suggests that TikTok’s inclusivity is presented as having spaces for everyone, not that everyone is equally welcome in all spaces. To engage in a particular community or content, users must actively “teach” the platform through their actions, engagements, and viewing patterns. The platform upholds power as it decidedly pushes content to the screen’s forefront by default, asking users to make choices within the provided content. The platform’s tools allow users to make targeted choices within the content provided, allowing a user an assumed perception of their literacy engagement, agency, and access.

This digital community is not without critique. TikTok’s algorithm often pushes content that promotes White heteronormative ideologies, which perpetuate offline systems of inequity (Boffone, 2022; S. Jerasa & Burriss, 2024; Tanksley, 2024). Other social media spaces have also been criticized for their hidden or subversive algorithms that privilege normative aesthetics, ideologies, or perceptions. In 2020, X/Twitter received criticism for its image-cropping algorithm, which would crop out or focus on the most significant part of an image. As Hearn (2020) describes, this technology’s bias chooses to promote white components of images while cropping out Black and Brown faces. Within TikTok, this preference for whiteness is sometimes not as apparent as it is masked within the interconnectedness and hidden algorithmic components. As such, “rabbit holes” or “silos” can function as promoting bias through the algorithms preference for particular trends or user behavior patterns (Maddox & Gill, 2023). Boffone (2022) describes the TikTok bias when he says, “TikTok is built around TikTokkers mimicking the platform’s most-followed accounts. That is, the repetition and virality of …videos, trends, dances, and aesthetics [that] replicate whiteness” (p. 23). This is not to say that historically marginalized identities, such as Black or Brown individuals, are not using this space. Instead, they are recreating these digital spaces to celebrate and elevate their identities and experiences through hashtags and subcommunities. Acknowledging TikTok’s hidden or subversive side, historically marginalized identities have used or found community within TikTok. For example, Martinez (2022) studied how Black teenage girls use TikTok to construct spaces of Black joy as a form of resistance against White supremacy and racist systems of oppression. While TikTok’s algorithm often amplifies certain voices, the platform can be used by Black, Brown, and LGBTQIA+ youth to actively engage and carve out spaces that serve their own needs and foster critical communities.

#BookTok is a thriving TikTok sub-community that brings readers and book enthusiasts together to share favorite titles, recommend genres or tropes and creatively engage with their literary passions. #BookTok provides a space for meaningful interaction among readers while leveraging TikTok’s multimodal tools, including audio, video filters, and music, to create engaging and emotionally resonant content (Merga, 2021; Wiederhold, 2022). #BookTok has garnered significant attention from readers, publishers, and the broader book industry. Its influence is evident in the rise in marketing strategies, such as Barnes & Noble’s #BookTok-themed displays and publishers collaborating with content creators for book promotions (Balling & Martens, 2024; Harris, 2021). This growing synergy between social and economic forces demonstrates #BookTok’s ability to shape literary trends and consumer behaviors, empowering teens and adults through a shared passion for books (Reddan et al., 2024).

The platform offers a space for users to exercise autonomy and agency, finding books (Dezuanni et al., 2022) through videos that often reflect personal interests rather than adhering to external rules or evaluations (Boffone & Jerasa, 2021). This dynamic shifts how individuals discuss and experience YA literature, making YA texts “memeable, fun, engaging, and socio-culturally relevant” (S. Jerasa & Boffone, 2021, p. 221). Recent scholarship has found that #BookTokers engage in the space not only to discuss books but as Asplund et al. (2024) posit, to “confirm, develop, and challenge their own reading practices” (p. 648) through social approaches, such as shared annotations or reading in a physical space with others. Additionally, Dezuanni and Schoonens (2024) argue that #BookTok can be positioned as a learning space as a form of peer pedagogies (Dezuanni, 2020) where content creators serve as teachers about “reading identities, critical thinking in book selection, goal-setting in reading, pleasure reading, and importantly, the value of media entertainment in encouraging reading” (p. 9). Dera et al., (2023) explored students’ “reading personas (e.g., bookworm, book doubter, or book avoider) to determine their potential #BookTok usage, finding that students with a positive reading attitude and who frequently read, viewed #BookTok with strong appeal; however, those with negative reading attitudes were less likely to use the space.

Overall, recent scholarship has confirmed the potential and power to inform and shape individuals’ reading behaviors and identities through digital participation. Since #BookTok frequently elevates marginalized voices and stories often excluded from traditional school curricula, fostering discussions, book clubs, and content around these texts. This inclusivity transforms #BookTok into a literacy space where youth can encounter diverse cultural, queer, and linguistic representation, creating a safe and affirming environment for self-expression and acceptance (S. Jerasa & Boffone, 2021). While Asplund et al. (2024) and Dera et al. (2023) both emphasize the potential impact of #BookTok on readers with varying attitudes and interests, neither study explicitly included the perspectives of individuals from diverse cultural or linguistic backgrounds. Therefore, it is important to understand such perspectives in order to determine the significance, application, and nuanced aspects of #BookTok for diverse readers. #Booktok scholarship has noted that the majority of content focuses on mainstream, popular texts or authors that reflect White, heteronormative perspectives (De Melo, 2024). De Melo (2024) found through a comparative analysis of the race, gender, and sexual orientation identities of #BookTok content creators, authors, and texts finding that although diversity exists, the space is, however, dominated by mostly White, female, and heteronormative texts, authors, and content creators. Despite this finding, diverse content still exists that serves as both representational and affirming community space for non-dominant viewpoints. Extending work by Martens et al. (2022) and Kulkarni (2024), #BookTok can be an affirming space for readers of diverse cultures and linguistic practices that are often not recognized in other online or analog spaces. As such, this study addresses a gap in #BookTok scholarship by examining how international creators with diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds and how the space fosters community, affirms identities, and advocates for equity.