Social media – and particularly social media as accessed through smartphones – transform certain aspects of spatio-temporality. Features such as continually editable ‘stories’, content which is initially ephemeral but may be screenshotted and saved, and dynamic, shifting, global networks of users all contribute to an arena in which multiple possibilities for what may happen are always present.

This thesis conceptualises this spatio-temporality as ‘virtual potentialities’, and uses that as a conceptual framework to explore how forty-seven UK teenagers navigate gender in social media, focusing specifically on Snapchat and Instagram.

It draws on data collected from interviews and observations across four UK youth clubs, mapping the stories teenagers told about their social media practices, and how these are gendered, and gendering. These stories are analysed thematically across chapters focusing on: bodies and self-representation; intimacy and relationships; and risk management practices.

In doing so, this thesis argues that social media must be understood as environments of ambivalence and contradiction, where teen users’ agency and vulnerability exist in tension with each other. Whilst factors such as the power and motivations of social media companies, or the nefarious intentions of social media strangers, may act as minor disciplining forces on teen social media users, by far the most powerful such forces are other social media users.