Accelerated modernity: What are the social media stories undergraduate students engage with?

This paper aims to show how current undergraduate students use social media in their daily lives, taking the first ten minutes of the day as a concentrated insight into their priorities of practice. The work draws on primary data from four focus groups of UK business students in higher education. Through the application of Rosa’s construct of social acceleration, initial findings indicate a hierarchy of priorities, shaped by economic, cultural and structural drivers in what social media is engaged with, in what sequence, and for what purpose. These choices reflect acceleration in the changes to the technology, the pace of social changes and the accelerated expectations of the pace of life. This article seeks to reimagine transmedia in the context of social media identity in an accelerated modernity. Here we have the intersection of three important rapidly changing constructs for the analysis of the use of media. These are the widespread, ubiquitous use of social media, the acceleration of late modernity and the impact of transmedia practice on how users engage with media.