Nostalgic Anticipation of the Future of Social Media in the Coverage of Emerging Platforms

I’m presenting a paper in this next session at the Social Media & Society 2024 conference, but we start with Chelsea Butkowski, whose interest is in emerging social media platforms. This is a tumultuous time for social media platforms, with considerable changes in ownership and structures and the emergence of new centralised as well as decentralised platforms and a great deal of speculation about the future of social media. In other words, there are plenty of sociotechnical imaginaries about social media at the moment, and perhaps social media are in a midlife crisis, or past their honeymoon phase.

How do we make sense of this; how do we know whether we are genuinely in a new era of social media? Media narratives provide an interesting window on this. These are stories about media technologies and change that attempt to help audiences make sense of such change, but also serve certain ideological, commercial, and social agendas. Social media were once presented as the quintessential ‘new’ media – but what happens when new media are no longer new, and perhaps even in a period of crisis?

We have moved beyond the excitement and utopian visions of Web 2.0, and through the techlash of Cambridge Analytica and other scandals; now we are in a new phase of platform emergence, with its own media narratives that present hippies, fears, and anxieties about the imagined futures that such framings support. This study focussed especially on English-language media narratives related to TikTok, BeReal, and Threads during the first 12-18 months of each platform’s life (with BeReal rather underrepresented in such data).

This found that social media specificity was central to such speculative narratives about these platforms; journalists were trying to explore what social media were for, and this was often filtered through a sense of media nostalgia, related to older and long-gone social media platforms (MySpace, Friendster, etc.).

TikTok coverage presented a sense of nostalgia for the quirky and creative communities on early social media, but also raised questions of danger and regulation. BeReal was highlighted for its nostalgic affordances, with features that afford an experience like the early Internet and enable an ‘authentic’, unvarnished self-representation, but was also covered for its lack of substantial commercial backing. Threads was also presented with a sense of nostalgia for the early runaway success of social media platforms, yet came similarly with trepidation over the corporate baggage that Meta and Mark Zuckerberg have accumulated by now.

This repeats some of the original hopes and fears about social media: authenticity, connection, and creative expression are highlighted (especially also in comparison to established social media platforms); while concerns about abuse, dysfunction, and data privacy are also highlighted here. Apparently signs that new platforms might be the killer app (especially to replace Twitter) were intuited in prominent fashion. Overall, journalists were nostalgically anticipating the future, wishing for the return of an older, less corporate version for social media.