The structure of social media has changed completely

It’s 2026 and if you’re feeling overwhelmed, you’re not alone. Over the past decade, the structure of social media has changed completely. In 2016, the introduction of Instagram’s algorithmic feed on top of its infinite scroll spurred a massive shift in how we consume online media, saying goodbye to its reverse-chronological feed. Just a couple of years after that, the influence of computational models was further exacerbated by the proliferation of TikTok’s For You Page, presenting recommended content rather than media from accounts or pages that one already chose to follow.

We’ve known for a while now that social media platforms created by Big Tech companies are designed and redesigned to capitalise off our attention spans for as long as possible. It may come as no surprise that before founding Instagram, co-founder Mike Krieger followed a class on “captology”, learning about computers as persuasive technologies. Fast forward to today, and what we experience on these platforms feels like increasingly fleeting and fragmented quicksand. Because by the time you’re done consuming your last piece of content, you’ve probably already forgotten where you started. And even attempts to resist these addictive technologies are outsourced to products we are sold, ranging from screen time limiting on smartphones to add-on physical objects like Tap Out and Brick. 

Not all narratives, forms of storytelling, or information fit neatly within the constraints of these platforms. Creators are incentivised to make content that performs well and conforms to constantly changing algorithmic rules and expectations. As consumers, the ways we perceive and process have been subtly, and not so subtly influenced by scrolling through ever-accelerating feeds. Even how we think is being molded by these technologies. As just one example from the early days of Twitter (r.i.p.), users would notice that they would start thinking in max 140 characters and that was two decades ago. 

But is this potential rewiring of our brains necessarily a bad thing? Or are we seeing a shift away from linear text-based media forms that have organised much of contemporary human communication? And not to mention the speculations that short form video formats pushed by various platforms are ushering in a new age of orality, even more than the television did.  

Where social media were once seen as democratising means providing anyone with a smartphone and internet ways to amplify their voice – one can also see how a handful of Big Tech companies now engineer the absorption of dissent, deciding who gets prioritised and who gets shadowbanned. This, in combination with their addictive tactics, consolidates a huge amount of power and influence in just a few soft corporate hands, partly at the cost of legacy and public media like TV and newspapers, which despite their own flaws, are probably easier to keep accountable than alt-right pipeline influencers and their Big Tech counterparts. 

For this year’s thematic focus, we will be looking at how schemes of organising and disseminating information have changed consuming, perceiving, and thinking. Are they all just persuasion tactics to gather data to sell and feed back to us, or are there alternative ways to understand and navigate these dizzying media labyrinths?

Stay tuned for the spring and autumn Symposihmms! Where we’ll harness the liminal seasons to deep dive inbetween those winter arcs.