In 2025, children and teenagers spend more time in their bedrooms online, rather than at their friend's house or in third places, like the mall. However, due to the mounting pressure of online performance and the Internet's increasingly hostile culture, teenagers are more hesitant to post online than generations prior. Why post online when one viral video can ruin your whole life?

This withdrawal from representation has implications, described in Hito Steyerl's "Spam of the Earth" essay¹ and Yancey Strickler's "Dark Forest Theory of the Internet"².

This means that the bedroom is the last place of refuge from society's pressures and expectations.

And the importance of the bedroom as a site for identity formation and self-actualization is more pronounced today, especially when there are fewer places for people to safely be themselves, to make mistakes, to be free from surveillance. The bedroom as a site is even more critical for children, teenagers, and young adults who are still exploring their identities.

The bedroom becomes a real life collage, where the Internet has “turned us all into ‘curators,’ whose self-expression is based on cataloguing and collecting, sometimes hoarding."⁴ Maya Man describes the use of collages in film, where a collaged room signals a teenage girl and suggests the lack of a fixed identity.⁵

Cutouts and posters are staples of a teenager's bedroom. Susan Sontag has written at length about how acquiring and displaying a poster is an attempt to express one's taste, desire, or aspiration.⁶

By collecting images or objects, both the bedroom and the Internet are sites for self-actualization. An article on Rookie Magazine, known for its collage aesthetic, has a guide explicitly explaining "how to make your room look like a movie."⁷ One's room can be designed to reflect a particular aesthetic or feeling desired by the owner. Gevinson and Petra Collins (known for her girlhood photography) created an installation titled Strange Magic which clearly resembles a teenager's bedroom.⁸

That aesthetic or feeling can be captured in a "moodboard." That moodboard might be a digital Pinterest board, or it might manifest itself as a physical vision board to be displayed in one's bedroom. On this vision board are symbols for identity construction, including "mascots of wealth and their belongings" ⁹(e.g. pictures of Bella Hadid or Hailey Bieber on our Pinterest boards).

Speaking of symbols of identity construction, we're now able to summarize these symbols under aesthetic categories like "that girl," "coquette," or "norm core." Prior to the Internet, curation may have been slower, limited to the physical magazines or other found images and objects you had on hand. But now, algorithms "help" us categories ourselves even further. Pinterest provides a semblance of agency and control, but in fact, we're very much influenced by the algorithm.

In "CALLING ALL TUMBLRINAS," Ester Freider compares "bedroom culture" and Tumblr which are strongly associated with teenage girls. Both are sites of cultural production, identity formation, aesthetic curation¹⁰—all of which has economic value, directly or not.¹¹

Freider cites Hito Steyerl's conception of the "poor image"¹² to contextualize how the reblogging feature on Tumblr creates cultural value. When images appear in new contexts, recontextualized by other images that the user has reblogged, they have begun the editing process.

As users recontextualize images and text, they begin to form networks and camaraderie with one another. They educate each other on social issues and even start cultural trends which are picked up by brands who want to sell back to teenagers.

As Phoebe Gibb explains, the teenage bedroom as an aspirational site has become so iconic that it inspires brands like Heaven by Marc Jacobs, where clothes become secondary to the curated collection of objects that reflect and shape the identity of the person/consumer (and in Heaven's case–brand).

But rather than being archival sites, bedrooms become aspirational sites, referencing existing and past trends, eras, objects, etc. Teenagers typically begin forming their identities through consumption of brands and media. And, teenagers are one of the most important consumer groups for advertisers due to their potential to become lifelong customers.

Gibbs argues that this collection of nostalgic objects with imbued cultural value renders the bedroom as a kind of commerce site, too.¹³ The fact that we accepted, or simply got used to, being surrounded by advertising on a daily basis means that we're open to cutting out editorials from fashion magazines to collage to our walls. Even room tours filmed by content creators produce both cultural and economic value. (Did anyone else watch juicystar07's room tour as a kid?)

Does ownership become a requirement to form or claim an identity? This is what fuels consumerism: when a consumer can't identify with a brand until they own the product. When examining Sara Cwynar's work (which is very collage-like), Mirjam Kooiman likens the infinite scroll on our screens to a conveyor belt, where an overabundance of images produces limitless desire and overconsumption.¹⁴ Slowly, we become beholden to all of the images and things we consume and own, like worship.

“The bedroom [...] stands for a lot of the silliness of our modern culture where the kinds of things that we worship in our sacred spaces are based on media and movies because we don’t really have much else in the way of myths.”¹⁵