ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sociol.
Sec. Medical Sociology
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2025.1492373
Why Are We Awake? Algorithmic Serendipity and the Sociology of Sleeplessness
Provisionally accepted
- 1University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
- 2University College Berkley, Berkley, United States
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Algorithmic serendipity is the seemingly chance encounter with exactly the right content, engineered by online recommender systems, linking individuals to one another and to digital remedies. This phenomenon transforms the individual experience of insomnia into a collective experience, creating communities around shared sleeplessness. Using a corpus of YouTube comments, we present a comprehensive theory of how algorithmic mediation may reshape insomnia in late modernity. Insomniacs forgo rest to read and share their experiences with sleeplessness, forging community instead of sleep. In tracing this loop, we show how disclosure practices, peer validation, and platform logic fuse to turn a private symptom into a shared social condition. The result is a paradox: the same digital infrastructures that soothe wakeful nights sustain insomnia.Recognizing this underscores that digital culture must sit at the center of sleep research. Interventions should target not only individuals, but the collective rhythms and norms that animate digital worlds.
Keywords: insomnia, algorithmic serendipity, Community building, youtube, Sleeplessness, Human-technology interactions
Received: 06 Sep 2024; Accepted: 13 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Bo, O’Sullivan, Bariol, Kucherenko and Behan. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Boroka Bo, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.