Are You Under the Influence? The Tail That Wags The Dog - Dhole Moments

Social Media Is Now Parasocial Media

When practitioners used the term “social media” to describe the internet tools that emerged in the mid-aughts, they were giving a name to the kinds of platforms and protocols that allowed people to socialize with friends and communities of interest by using digital technologies. Twenty years later, users of social media are far more likely to scroll than post – and the content that they consume is often strategically produced and algorithmically curated. In this essay, I argue that the very essence of social media has changed. To more effectively interrogate what we are witnessing, we need to stop presuming that these tools are “social media” and begin recognizing that they are now “parasocial media.” Doing so raises new questions about digitally mediated sociality, not to mention the politics and governance of these platforms.

Marc Andreessen as Avatar for Societal Decay

How one venture capitalist represents everything wrong with social media

The Nightmare of Eternal Spring: Why Social Media Can't Survive on "Niceness" Alone - Nightflight

Choosing to Stay Human

If you go to your favorite social media site, you will find it full of posts that start to look suspiciously similar to each other:

Designing the Social

This book explores the complex place of social media in young people’s lives and the role it plays in shaping how they understand and present their identity publicly on a wide array of platforms. It proposes a new theoretical framework, Comic Theory, for understanding identity performances.

Designing the Social

This book explores the complex place of social media in young people’s lives and the role it plays in shaping how they understand and present their identity publicly on a wide array of platforms. It proposes a new theoretical framework, Comic Theory, for understanding identity performances.

How social media is fueling an intense form of romantic obsession

The digital world is primed to fuel episodes of profound infatuation known as limerence.

Custodians of the Internet

A revealing and gripping investigation into how social media platforms police what we post online—and the large societal impact of these decisions Most use...

Building A Prosocial Media Ecosystem | NOEMA

There’s never been a better time to make social media what it always should have been: a tool to strengthen rather than strip-mine the social fabric.

Blue Skies Ahead: Social Media's Quiet User Revolution

In a digital landscape increasingly defined by user concerns over privacy and control, a quiet revolution is taking shape.

In pursuit of 'Instagram face,' are we losing the imperfections that make us human?

Plastic surgery is becoming so normalized and undetectable, it's changing our relationship to reality. The New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino considers how beauty standards have dovetailed with AI.

Digital Avatars | The Paper Pilot

The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology

Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, and Enduring Polarization

The social media ecosystem appears to be in flux. Twitter’s rebranding to X has come to symbolize a broader reorganization of online publics – political reshuffling, user attrition, and uncertainty over the role of legacy platforms. Simultaneously, the shift from text-based, networked feeds toward algorithmically curated, short-form video has accelerated, with TikTok setting the pace for the wider ecosystem [18, 14, 16]. At the same time, everyday communication increasingly migrates from large, open networks to semi-private spaces such as group chats and messaging apps. Commentators describe a digital public sphere in transition: smaller, more fragmented, less dominated by traditional social networking sites, and rise of more broadcast-oriented forms of media – with some even suggesting that we are seeing the beginning of the end of the social media era.