My new book TikTok and Youth Cultures is now out in the world – purchase via Emerald Publishing or Amazon. If you’d like to know more or are an instructor who would like to teach this book in your class, see this page for multimedia resources and a detailed contents page.

This book would have been published three years sooner if not for the fact that I have been so enveloped with grief in recent years. Between commencing the first words of the proposal for this book and wrapping up the minutiae of final production, I welcomed three children into the world and lost six loved ones.

In honour of having this manuscript be my companion throughout four years of consecutive highs and lows, I dedicate it to my precious firstborn Omelette and in the memory of one of my best friends in the world, Katie Warfield. The world is better with you in it.

A dedication

“To my wider collegial community in academia, I want to take a moment to partake in a little public vulnerability and acknowledge that finishing this project was a great challenge for me.

As the pandemic wore on, many of us had to prematurely truncate fieldwork and projects, and conjure creative pivots to sustain our work. The trying few years that followed saw academic job losses at shocking levels, as so many of our colleagues found themselves in greater insecurity in an already precarious industry. There were days when it made no sense to sit at a laptop to type words, when it felt like the world was falling apart, and when I had lost many loved ones in succession to various illnesses.

Among these, our academic community had to bid farewell to Dr Katie Warfield – a luminary in the field of digital media studies, a brilliant writer, a generous mentor, a kind friend and really an impeccable specimen of a human being. It was difficult to work through the grief of losing a very treasured friend who was close to my heart, and even more frustrating still to feel so far away and separate from our special crew of found family amidst the halt on international travel.

During this very bewildering time, I am immensely grateful for many colleagues-turned-friends who have been guiding lights and soothing comforts to me and for those around us: Kath Albury, Paul Byron, Stefanie Duguay, Natalie Ann Hendry, Amelia Johns, Gabriel Pereira, Brady Robards, Katrin Tiidenberg, César Albarrán-Torres – from the bottom of my heart, thank you. To Christina Chau, Natalie Pang, Gabriele de Seta and Meg Jing Zeng: Thank you for being my voices of reason during this pandemic season.”

A backstory

TikTok and Youth Cultures was published in November 2025. It is now March 2026.

I have been extremely lethargic and unmotivated to promote this book – this coming from someone who once upon a time completed an intercontinental book tour of over 30 stops and really enjoyed it.

While writing up this book (concurrently with Child Influencers: How children become entangled with social media fame), many important people in my life died in succession: One of my best friends from early in my PhD journey, my godbrother from childhood, a good friend from church, the uncle who doted on me the most, my dad.

But I also birthed three wonderful little humans into the world in this same season.

And in the current permacrisis with people I know and love living in conflict zones and dying of illness, academic work has come to feel o insignificant and trivial.

But if I’m honest about it, it hit me the hardest when the author copies arrived at my home and I realized this will be the first time I won’t be able to hand my dad my new work.

He was the only person in the world who had read every book I’d ever written from cover to cover, and had thoughts to share each time.

So suddenly, I’m sitting here with the big feelings of my dad dying while I was on parental leave, grappling with the whiplash of joy and grief, and realizing that the one person whose validation I ever cared for is dead.

And suddenly, my inner child (me; I am not currently incubating a fourth child) felt that celebrating these books would be futile because what was the point of it all?

A few days ago, while working from home, my 4yo Omelette sat in my office with me. She glided her finger across the books on my shelf then asked why these ones had the “same words” on them.

She was referring to my name: Crystal Abidin.

I told that it was mama’s name. Then, she pointed at each book and articulated my name slowly but clearly: “Crys-tal A-bi-din… Crys-tal A-bi-din… Crys-tal A-bi-din…”

And then she turned to meet my gaze and exclaimed: “Wow! Good job, mama!”

And then I burst into tears – the happy kind. The ones of relief. The release and acceptance that I am okay, I did well. It was a hard time, it is still a hard time, but it is okay that things are hard.

tl;dr: So I wrote some books and people I loved died during the time and my dad dying didn’t register in me until months later when my books arrived at my doorstep and I felt tired and ashamed and angry and didn’t welcome them in the world properly but then my 4yo gave me perspective and now I think I can get out of this rut and proudly tie a bow on this significant achievement despite more important things happening in a permacrisis world.

Thank you for reading.