Anniversary Reflections on Social Media’s Trajectory
A Field Looking Back
The anniversary issue gathers a generation of scholars who helped name “social media” now sitting with the discomfort of what it became. Across these essays, a shared diagnosis emerges: the platforms that the field grew up studying have curdled, and the conceptual vocabulary inherited from the mid-2000s no longer fits its object. What differs is where each author locates the rot, what they mourn, and what they propose in its place.
The Loss of the Social
The strongest through-line is a recognition that “social” has drained out of social media. Boyd2026-op makes this terminological argument most explicitly, proposing that scholars deprecate “social media” in favor of “parasocial media” to register the shift from reciprocal peer exchange to one-sided attention directed at professionalized influencers. Marwick2026-ss and its companion fieldnotes Marwick2026-qd arrive at the same diagnosis through autoethnography rather than taxonomy: LiveJournal’s granular privacy filters, lengthy reciprocal posts, and subcultural scale produced an intimacy that today’s mega-platforms structurally foreclose. Both authors insist this trajectory was contingent—a product of advertising-driven political economy, consolidation, and algorithmic optimization—not a technological inevitability. The implication is that critique must be paired with imagination of small-scale, care-oriented alternatives, since cloning Twitter (as Bluesky does) cannot recover what was lost.
Intensifying Harms and the Limits of Critique
Where Boyd and Marwick foreground what has been hollowed out, Baym2026-tr tallies what has metastasized. Revisiting her 2015 manifesto, Baym shows that the four threats she named—wealth inequality, algorithmic opacity, precarious creative labor, and data extraction—have each worsened, with tech wealth now translating directly into political power via the “broligarchy” and generative AI weaponizing user-generated content. Her most uncomfortable move is reflexive: the field has produced abundant critique with little discernible effect on conditions. This complicates the implicit hope in Marwick’s essays that better diagnosis points toward better infrastructure. Swartz2026-zb sharpens the picture further by arguing that scams are not a deviation from the platform economy but its organizing logic—a “scam age” in which hustle culture, MLMs, crypto, and anti-fraud surveillance infrastructures jointly constitute digital economic citizenship. If Baym shows that things are bad, Swartz suggests they are bad in a particular way the field has under-theorized: the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate economic life has dissolved into platform sociality itself.
Convergences: Contingency, Political Economy, Infrastructure
Despite different entry points—nostalgia, taxonomy, manifesto-revisited, fraud—the essays converge on three claims. First, the present arrangement is contingent: Marwick2026-ss, Boyd2026-op, and Baym2026-tr each emphasize that financialization, consolidation, and algorithmic incentives—not technology per se—produced enshittification, parasociality, and broligarchy. Second, the harms are infrastructural rather than incidental: anti-fraud systems in Swartz2026-zb, creator-economy precarity in Baym2026-tr, and the foreclosure of semi-private community space in Marwick2026-qd all locate the problem at the level of how platforms are built and governed. Third, the analytic categories the field inherited—“social media,” “user,” “creator,” “fraud”—are doing boundary work that obscures present realities; each essay performs some terminological recalibration.
Divergences: Where Should the Field Go?
The essays part ways on what comes next. Marwick’s twin pieces gesture toward exit and reimagination—small-scale, reciprocal, stewardship-oriented infrastructures, with the author herself retreating to Signal and Instagram stories. Boyd calls for conceptual renovation so that scholarly tools can analyze parasocial media’s distinct governance and inequality dynamics. Baym is the most institutionally pointed, urging researchers to abandon critique-for-its-own-sake in favor of interdisciplinary, cross-sector collaboration that might actually shape policy and design. Swartz extends the research agenda outward, asking scholars to take scams seriously as a dominant economic and cultural form rather than a marginal pathology. Read together, the cluster suggests an anniversary mood that is neither celebratory nor purely elegiac: the founding cohort is renaming its object, confessing the limits of its prior interventions, and arguing—with varying degrees of hope—that the next twenty years of scholarship must be louder about contingency and more committed to building rather than only diagnosing.