Social Media Should Feel Like Minecraft, Not Instagram: Youth Visions for Meaningful Social Connections through Fictional Inquiry

TL;DR

This study used Fictional Inquiry with youth to envision a more meaningful, immersive social media platform that fosters genuine connections, challenging current platform limitations and highlighting design opportunities.

Contribution

It introduces a novel FI-based co-design approach to explore youth visions for social media, emphasizing immersive, playful, and relational features often absent in existing platforms.

Findings

Youth prefer immersive, playful social platforms like Minecraft over traditional social media.

Fictional Inquiry effectively generated innovative ideas and empowered youth participation.

Design themes highlight relational needs marginalized by current social media.

Abstract

We conducted co-design workshops with 23 participants (ages 15--24) to explore how youth envision ideal remote social connection. Using Fictional Inquiry (FI) within a Harry Potter-inspired narrative, we found that youth perceive a disconnect between platforms labeled ``social media'' (like Instagram) and those where they actually experience meaningful connections (like Minecraft or Discord). Participants envisioned an immersive platform prioritizing meaningful social connection through presence and immersion, natural self-expression, intuitive spatial navigation leveraging physical-world norms, and playful, low-stakes opportunities for friendship development. We synthesize these visions into six themes articulating relational needs that current platforms systematically marginalize. The FI method proved effective in generating innovative ideas while empowering youth by fostering hope and agency over social media's future. Our findings challenge ``doom'' narratives by reframing social media's harms as outcomes of specific design choices, demonstrating how design research can reopen space for imagining more supportive forms of mediated connection.