Social Media Imaginaries and the City: How the Attention Economy Is Reshaping Urban Built Environments

Abstract

Social media are becoming a growing presence in our cities, filtering our experience of urban place and enabling locations to “go viral.” This article examines the downstream consequences of this new reality, examining how the urban actors who shape the city consider social media in their work. Drawing on ethnographic research and interviews with elite investors in São Paulo’s gentrifying Centro neighborhood, this article finds that social media are ever-present force in the production of the city. The capacity of social media to shape imaginaries and steer flows of people—and therefore flows of capital—have emerged as a powerful economic logic, integral to the city’s economic machinery. In pursuit of online attention, investors are adapting the city to fit their understanding of what “works” on social media—changing not only superficial designs and aesthetics, but even in which buildings they invest. Restaurants and bars come to function as intermediaries for the exchange of attention capital: they purchase attention from influencers, in turn marketing it to their customers and exchanging accumulated digital clout for free beer and new kitchens from their suppliers. Attention is transforming the very built environment of the city, which in turn provides essential physical infrastructure for the attention economy. While social media platforms may be diverse in their biases and characteristics, this article argues that the imperative of data accumulation has produced an era in which everything—even our cities—is shaped by the pursuit of attention.

Introduction

Media is a peculiar institution. As media scholars have long argued, there is a colonizing aspect to the logic of media—it seeps into other social institutions and cultural practices, permeating every aspect of our societies and lives. Politics, religion, education, and public discourse are remolded by media’s influence, as individuals and organizations adapt their practices to align with their understanding of media’s preferences (Couldry & Hepp, 2018). Through this process of “mediatization” (Hjarvard, 2008), the operational logic of the dominant form of media gradually comes to define the broader cultural logic of its era (McLuhan, 1994; Postman, 1985).

In the city, the presence of social media has become increasingly palpable in recent years. The first sign of its growing influence was a number of quirky news-stories in the international press, telling of how certain buildings or landmarks—sometimes as unremarkable as a crumbling brick wall—would inexplicably become flooded with selfie-stick wielding visitors (FitzGerald, 2020). It appeared that places could now ‘go viral’—emerging as a new form of online celebrities (Zhang et al., 2022; Zou, 2025)—seemingly for the most unexpected and arbitrary of reasons (Banks, 2023). Other stories told of towns that had previously been characterized by high-end art boutiques being suddenly overtaken by hordes of smart-phone wielding teenagers—chasing digital critters who by reasons of some incidental algorithmic quirk had made the town their home (Le, 2020). These stories seemed to hint of how the digital world had begun to leak into the physical.

A small but growing academic literature has over the last few years examined how platforms like Google Maps, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Airbnb have become part of the urban experience (Barns, 2019; Halegoua, 2020; Jansson, 2019; McQuire, 2008). Parts of this literature have highlighted the platforms as part of a new mode of capitalism, focusing on economic and material dimensions of an emerging imperative of data extraction (Barns, 2019; Leszczynski, 2020; van Doorn, 2020). Others have examined social media as a lens through which the city is seen—refracted and distorted—in ways that promotes certain ways of experiencing it over other. Through their filtering, these platforms impact how we understand and experience the city and its communities, showing “a curious inflection of life in the city, refashioned according to a peculiar aesthetic” (Boy & Uitermark, 2023, p. 12). The precise tint of these filters vary across platforms (Törnberg & Uitermark, 2022); while Instagram likes simple, bright, colorful, with happy and positive messages, and renders the city as an “an indeterminable stream of peak moments” by the “happy, healthy and hip” (Boy & Uitermark, 2017, p. 617), Twitter/X has a flair for the clever and snarky—emphasizing conflict and outrage. As a result, “the ways in which we make sense of the world phenomenologically become necessarily entangled with the constraints, affordances and power-relations that are features of media as infrastructures for communication” (Couldry & Hepp, 2018). The literature has thus emphasized how the logic of social media is part of shaping a certain representation of the city, entailing certain exclusions and inclusions—as the voices and experiences of some are heard, while others are erased (Degen & Rose, 2022).

While the theoretical literature has long emphasized the mutual co-construction between the spatial and the digital (Graham, 2005), most empirical studies have tended to focus on how social media represents and co-produces space, or on how people “use digital media to become placemakers” (Halegoua, 2020, p. 4). Meanwhile, the other side of the co-constitution—the ways in which the city adapts and responds to these representations—has been given relatively less attention. This underemphasis has meant that our understanding of relationship between platforms and the city remains partial.

To contribute to filling this gap, this article seeks to examine the downstream consequences of how social media filter and refract the city, focusing on how social media reshapes the built urban environment. This article takes an ethnographic approach, and examines on how social media figures into the motivations and actions of actors who are shaping the city (Coleman, 2010). By tracing how individuals seek to draw advantages in their pursuits by adapting to their ideas of what “works” on platforms (Van Es & Poell, 2020), this article seeks to understand how the operational logic of social media comes to spread to parts of society that are seemingly unrelated to media. Empirically, this article focuses on the elite clique of investors who are most powerful in shaping the built environment of restaurants and nightlife in the gentrifying Centro neighborhood in São Paulo, and examine how social media figures into their work. Combining interviews and fieldwork on both social media and in the physical world, this article examines how the logic of social media leaks into the city. By focusing on a city and neighborhood outside the Global North, this article contributes to moving beyond the Euro-American centrism of the literature (Milan & Treré, 2019).

This article finds that social media play a central role in the actions of the investors. The capacity of social media to steer flows of people have made them a powerful economic logic, which is interwoven into the fabric of contemporary cities. Social media are no longer merely refracting and filtering the city through their biased representations; rather, their heterogeneous biases have become an integral part of the underlying financial machinery of the city, and central to shaping the built environment. Social media define a novel form of capital—attention—for which restaurants and bars function as powerful intermediaries, purchasing it from online influencers, and in turn trading it for beverages and equipment from their suppliers. If, as Postman (1985) argued, the television meant that everything was cast as entertainment, then social media should be understood as ushering in an era where everything—even our cities—must conform to the medium’s logic of attention capture.

Media and the City

When we engage with cities today, we often do so informed or mediated by the interfaces of platforms like Google Maps, Instagram, Facebook, TripAdvisor, or Airbnb. As we see and engage with the city through these platforms, their the code and data become intertwined with our daily lives and practices (Dodge & Kitchin, 2005). The social practices associated with digital media—checking in, posting stories, taking selfies—blur the line between the spatial and the digital (Gordon & e Silva, 2011; Kitchin & Dodge, 2014; Zook & Graham, 2007), thus coming to “alter the conditions through which society, space, and time, and thus spatiality, are produced” (Kitchin & Dodge, 2014, p. 13). As social life becomes enmeshed with mediated processes (Couldry & Hepp, 2018), we can experience place from afar—and place thus ceases being a straightforwardly geographical referent (Törnberg & Uitermark, 2022). While urban studies has long neglected the role of media in urban processes, the rise of platforms have in recent years triggered rapid growth of research on what is variably called the “media city” (McQuire, 2008), “digital city” (Halegoua, 2020), “mediatized city” (Törnberg & Uitermark, 2022), or “geomedia city” (Hartmann & Jansson, 2024), focusing on the implications of mediation on our experience of the city.

We may broadly distinguish two strands within the literature on media and the city. First, the literatures on “platform urbanism” (Barns, 2019; Leszczynski, 2020; van Doorn, 2020), and “smart urbanism” (Cardullo & Kitchin, 2019; Kitchin, 2014) tend to take a critical position, viewing the mediation of urbanity as part of the workings of a mode of capitalism “centred upon extracting and using a particular kind of raw material: data” (Srnicek, 2017, p. 39). Through this lens, urban platforms are an expression of the annexation of urban infrastructures into this mode of data accumulation (Sadowski, 2020a). The platforms are understood to operate by conditioning social life and defining the means through which individuals interact and experience the world, employing their intermediation to engage in data commodification, value extraction, and data governance within our every-day life (Langley & Leyshon, 2017). As platforms and digital media have grown in importance within the study of cities and geographies, so have cities and geographies simultaneously grown in importance within the literature on “digital capitalism” (Sadowski, 2020b) or “platform capitalism” (Srnicek, 2017). Scholars have come to highlight the centrality of the urban in this emerging form of capitalist accumulation, suggesting irreducible, co-generative dynamics between platforms and the city (Barns, 2019), and thus reconstituting the very “perceptual fabric of space, a fabric that knits socio-spatial practices into something we have come to think of as ‘the urban’” (p. 56).

Empirical research in these fields has focused especially on how platformization and datafication have transformed material and economic dimensions of the city—in particular short-term rental services, food delivery, and urban transportation (Wachsmuth & Weisler, 2018), as well as urban governance and citizenship (Cardullo et al., 2019; Leszczynski, 2016). The so-called “sharing economy” platforms have been a particular focus of these literatures, as Airbnb and Uber offer clear examples of how mediation can be used as a strategy to shirk regulation and taxation (Törnberg, 2023; van Doorn, 2020).

The second strand of scholarship has sought to add nuance to the grand narratives of platform capitalism, highlighting the agency and capacity of participants to reappropriate platforms to their own purposes (Armano et al., 2022), giving rise to diverse and unintended social practices through the creativity of users (e Silva & Frith, 2012). Whereas the former strand focuses primarily on economic and material dimensions, this strand has tended to focus more on the cultural dimensions of platforms, examining platforms as a new layer on which urban place can be staged, negotiated, and enacted (Degen & Rose, 2022; Halegoua, 2020). Digital media and cities are understood intersecting spaces that both enable the management of impression and the expression of lifestyles and identities (Törnberg, 2022b). Social media platforms can hence be understood and studied as embedded within wider sets of relations, and woven into the fabric of everyday life (Boy & Uitermark, 2023).

As the platforms mediate social relations, these relations are also reconfigured by the logic of the platforms (Lane, 2018). The tendency of media technologies to shape the content that they mediate has been debated since McLuhan (1962), arguing that every medium has its own “grammar” (Postman, 1985). These logics mean that the medium effectively constrains what type of messages can be transmitted. Postman (1985) famously argued that the rise of the television brought the all-encompassing logic of entertainment: the television demanded that all content—whether news, politics, religion, or education—conform to the medium’s entertainment-driven logic. Such logics are in part produced by the medias’ designs and affordances (Weltevrede & Borra, 2016), but they are also a question of the cultures that over time emerge through the agency of consumers and creators. While nothing in principle prevents us from, for instance, posting lengthy academic papers on Instagram and aestheticized photos of our lunch on ResearchGate, such messages go against the media logics of the respective platforms and are unlikely to be widely seen (Langlois & Elmer, 2013; van Dijck & Poell, 2013).

As we experience the city through media interfaces, consequently, these media logics filter the city that is represented: aspects of the city that happen to “fit” the platform are highlighted and widely diffused, while things that do not are muted. Just like posts and images work differently well on social media, so do buildings and designs resonate differently with the platforms’ preferences. The fleeting property of “shareability,” “virality” and “instagrammability” determine their digital visibility (Hochman & Manovich, 2013). Platforms have thus emerged as “a powerful engine for the cultural representation of neighborhoods” (Törnberg & Chiappini, 2020): as the city is filtered by media—aspects of the city that “work well” on specific platforms are spotlighted, while things that do not are concealed.

How Social Media Refract the City

Seen through platforms like Instagram, “the complexity of the city is often annihilated, as are the life forms of less profitable groups of inhabitants, those whose lives do not contribute to data-driven accumulation” (Hartmann & Jansson, 2024). Visual platforms often emphasize consumption experiences, casting place as part of a symbolic economy of distinction, thus becoming part of the visual and discursive enlargement of gentrification (Bronsvoort & Uitermark, 2022; Evans & Saker, 2017). Social media thus accelerates the aestheticization of urban space, in ways that feed the alienation of those who are systematically left out of the picture, or even the communities that are exoticized and turned into marketable experiences for outsiders (Törnberg & Chiappini, 2020)—making long-term inhabitants feel out-of-place in their own homes. Social media thus become entangled with existing urban inequalities. Certain groups are empowered to define the meaning of places and communities, while others struggle to be heard. Certain places become swarmed with visitors, while others are forgotten. Certain ways of engaging with the city are empowered and coordinated, while others are denied.

Social media are moreover associated with highly unequal distributions of attention (Cha et al., 2010; Törnberg, 2022a). The feedback mechanisms that are central to nearly every social media platform mean that attention tends to attract attention, meaning that some users will be elevated to the status of micro-celebrities, while the large majority will have very limited voice (Abidin, 2018; Marwick, 2013). An emerging literature on “wanghong urbanism” (Zhang et al., 2022; Zou, 2025) has suggested that the same dynamics plays out also in relation to place, meaning that some urban locations will “go viral” and emerge as spatialized form of internet celebrities. The logics of social media are hence filtering and shaping how we perceive and experience cities, with very real consequences for urban life.

Building on these literatures, this article seeks to examine how the urban actors that build the city adapt to their imaginaries of social media, thereby enabling the operational logic of social media to shape the built environment. This article hence uses the city as a case to trace the process of social media’s “mediatization,” that is, how social media comes to reshape aspects of society that are seemingly unrelated to media. To do so, we need to move beyond the focus on digital representations, toward a contextually grounded examination of how urban actors understand social media, and how this understanding comes to shape their actions in the city. Such a focus requires an ethnographic approach to digital media, in which we examine not only media representations, but also seek to examine the actions and motivations of actors in the city (Coleman, 2010).

Research Area

This article relies on a qualitative case study of the São Paulo neighborhood Zona Central—commonly referred to as Centro. São Paulo is, with a population of roughly 22 million inhabitants, the fourth largest city in the world, located in the southeastern region of Brazil (Oyeyinka, 2010). The city is one of the foremost industrial and financial centers in Latin America, and was for a long period the engine of the national economy. By focusing on São Paulo, this article not only focuses on one of the largest cities in the world but also contributes to moving beyond the current Anglocentric focus on the effects of social media and datafication (Milan & Treré, 2019).

Centro is the oldest neighborhood of São Paulo, where the city was founded by Jesuit priests in 1554, and remains the historic and administrative core of São Paulo. Centro is home to some of the most iconic places in São Paulo, such as Catedral da Sé, Pátio do Colégio, Edifício Martinelli, Theatro Municipal and Mercado Municipal. Centro is at times referred to as “centro historico” (historical center) or “centro cultural” (cultural center), as it is home to many important architectural sites and tourist attractions. Officially, the central zone is delimited by the districts of the Sé Subprefecture, but the social perception of Centro varies, and often includes other areas of the municipality. This is in part a result of historical changes, as Centro used to also include parts of the districts of Brás and Pari, prior to the creation of the Sé Subprefecture. As we are here interested in the cultural associations and perceptions, this article follows the investors use of the term “Centro,” regardless of whether it corresponds exactly to the official definitions.

Centro was once the main financial districts of the municipality and home to a rich urban elite. From the 1970s on, however, the area entered into a cycle of urban “degradation,” as companies and high- and middle-income residents started to move to other areas of the city, in turn intensifying disinvestments (Diogo & Maricato, 2004). Centro fell into a decline driven by disinvestment, road congestion, floods, rising crime, informal economy, wealth flight, prostitution, and drug problems. While the average income remains higher than that of other regions of the city, Centro become home to a large share of the city’s homeless population and has pockets of intense poverty. Since the 1990s, the Luz area in particular has attracted the city’s crack cocaine users (Reichert, 2024), becoming known as Cracolândia (“Crack-land”) for its relationship to the growing epidemic (Fábio, 2017; Rui, 2016). Centro hence transformed from the city’s political and economic hub to a neglected and degraded area.

Centro has seen several attempts at revitalization already since the 1970s, with “Projeto Centro” (1973–1975) and “Plano Integrado da Área Central” (1975–1979; Shimbo, 2013). More recent attempts include the Nova Luz Project, created by the city government in 2004, seeking to draw on private-sector consortium to carry out large-scale revitalization (Souza, 2011). These initiatives include controversial actions such as so-called “higienização” (“hygienization”), involving the forcible removal of unhoused individuals to peripheral areas of the city under the pretext of public safety and urban revitalization (Garmany & Richmond, 2020). While controversial for their heavy-handedness, these projects have yet struggled to boost consistent rehabilitation.

Recent years have however seen an increasing number of high-end restaurants and bars emerging in Centro, starting during Brazil’s 2010 economic upswing driven by the commodity hyperboom (Reina & Comarú, 2015). Centro saw an intensification of revitalization efforts and economic flowback of to the area. The República district, in particular, has transformed from a derelict part of the center to now being increasingly seen as “revitalized,” following a rise in real estate investments since 2012. Centro has seen a growing number of high-end bars and restaurants targeting high-income clientele, nested among the iconic architecture. As a result, Centro now appears as a space of sharp contrast between hip bars and restaurants—frequented by the White and wealthy—and the tent-camps of the substantial homeless population (Harris & Pooler, 2024).

Data and Methods

This article relies on interviews, analysis of social media posts, and several on-the-ground visits, seeking to examine how investors adapt to their imaginaries of the platforms’ representations of the neighborhood. The author furthermore draws on substantial experience of the city, the neighborhoods, and the discussed establishments. The interview subjects were selected based on their material influence in shaping the nightlife consumption of the area. Interviews were conducted with five investors, who between them are associated with many of the most influential, successful, and visible establishments in the neighborhood. As the investors showed a remarkable level of agreement, this article will not differentiate between them in the following text. Access to such individuals is challenging, as few of these subjects would be open to interviews without an initial connection or introduction. However, the ownership of the Sao Paulo nightlife scene is dominated by individuals from relatively small social clique. By spending time in São Paulo, the author got to know individuals from this clique, who in turn could connect to others. The interviews thus built on recommendations, using each interviewee to gain access to additional subjects—through a form of “snowball” approach.

The interviews were carried out over Zoom, and in either English or Portuguese according to the interviewees’ preference. The quotes used in the article have been translated by the author. The interviews lasted around 1 hour, in which the interviewer asked the subjects about their background, their establishments, their social media strategy, and the way that digital media has transformed their business. All interviewees consented to participation and to being cited in this article.

As this article focuses on how the interviewees understand and perceive the logics of social media, the author asked the investors about “social media,” and followed their definitions and understanding. For the investors interviewed, Instagram is the by far most important platform—with Twitter/X as a distant second. They described platforms like TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Google Maps as largely irrelevant for their businesses, as these platforms are seen as less important in Brazil than in Europe. While Facebook used to be an important platform, the investors described it as having in recent years completely lost its relevance. Beyond Instagram, WhatsApp is another highly influential platform in Brazil—running everything from private security to food delivery to news consumption. However, the investors described it as less important for their business, as it is focused on private group chats. The perceptions of the investors described below should hence be chiefly understood as focusing on how the aesthetics and preferences of Instagram.

To investigate how the strategies of the businesses were reflected in the digital media representation, the author also analyzed Instagram posts, as this represented the dominant platform in the investors view. This analysis focused on both messages in which the establishments were tagged, as well as posts from the establishments themselves. These posts illustrate the mediatized view of the built environment. The author examined the 100 most recent posts from the establishment, and the 200 most recent posts in which the establishment is tagged/mentioned.

Centro Through the Digital Lens

The social media following of the establishments on Instagram is striking. While the small-scale neighborhood bars and restaurants where one may enjoy a low-cost prato feito are largely invisible, the establishments owned by the interviewed investors and targeting the middle and upper classes had between 50,000 and 200,000 followers on Instagram. Even a relatively small—but exceedingly cool—hot dog stand has nearly 100,000 followers. The discrepancy in visibility highlights how, as previous scholars have noted, social media highlights the aesthetics and cultural expressions of urban gentrifiers, relative to the longer-time residents (Bronsvoort & Uitermark, 2022).

When comparing the experience of being physically present in Centro with the visual representation in posts tagging the neighborhood, the bias of representation is striking. While posts are diverse, there is a clear dominance of the display of consumption. While the physical experience of walking through Centro—depending on the time of day—is dominated by people asking for money, food delivery bikers, middle-class office workers, and the tent and cardboard camps that house the homeless population, the view through the lens of Instagram captures a different world entirely—one decidedly further on in its gentrification process. It shows champagne glasses raised from skyscraper rooftops, and smiling faces over rich platters overflowing with oysters. There are close-ups of beautiful consumption items—cappuccino, ice creams, colorful cupcakes, and cocktails. On social media, Centro is represented as a well-off, highly aestheticized place of luxury and high-end consumption by the young, White and beautiful.

Attention as Aesthetics

Social media is ever-present in the work of the investors. As one interviewee put it, “we’re all thinking about social media, every day, all day.” The interlocutors highlighted that while they may have a social media team focusing on the way they present themselves on social media, social media are not a distinct sphere from the rest of their activities—but rather an integral part of every part of their strategies, investments, design, and work. Social media is not like the newspaper advertising of old, but more like a “wave” that you must try to ride. As a result, even things that are ostensibly unrelated to media or advertising must be adapted. “Social media has changed everything. It’s changed all our lives. How we organize events. How we design places. Where we invest.”

Part of this is of course about providing the necessary basic “infrastructure” for sharing—a fast and open Wi-Fi connection, and lightning that allows taking appealing phone photos of the photogenically presented meals (Chang & Spierings, 2023). However, most establishments go far beyond just providing such basics: they adapt their overall aesthetics, and provide design environments, backdrops, and elements to actively encourage sharing. As one interviewee put it: “There’s isn’t a place or a festival that don’t think about social media when they set up. There’s always an area, or thing, or something that is made to be photographed.”

Such social media designs have often involved “instagrammable places”: a designated area of the establishment that is designed specifically to work as a backdrop for social media photographs. This may consist of an artistic and colorful wall—often with the name of the event or establishment embedded in the patterns—or a space where guests can be captured interacting with the light and decoration. However, the investors highlighted that such areas can be seen as “tacky,” and that the social media design needs to be more subtly integrated into the overall aesthetics of the establishment.

A well-designed establishment therefore needs to provide elements that encourage sharing without it being obvious that they are encouraging sharing, and that permit visitors to take pictures without appearing overly self-absorbed. The establishment, the investor explains, needs to provide guests with an excuse for taking a picture. His own bar, for instance, offers a wall covered in post-it notes with messages that light up under an overhead blacklight, where guests can write jokes, pickup lines, or clever quotes (see Figure 1). “It is not obvious that is made for Instagram, but it works well on Instagram.” Another investor follows a similar logic, offering quotes written in neon lights:

You know those texts with neon lights in our karaoke bar? Those are planned, for Instagram. It’s an absurd flock of people coming for that. It has basically turned into a tourist destination at this point, because of social media (see Figure 2).

Many establishments offer what can be best described as inconspicuous stage props for social media photographs, such as the pig-nose cocktail cups of a high-end pork-themed restaurant. When a guest drinks from the cup, they incidentally give themselves a pig snout, encouraging the sharing of playfully self-deprecating photos (see Figure 3). The environment is thus in subtle ways shaped to fit the particular logic of social media platforms.

Figure 1.

A note from the post-it note wall subtly intended to encourage Instagram sharing.

Figure 2.

The upper photos show posts taken by visitors featuring the neon lights of Tokyo that are designed for sharing, and have turned into a minor tourism destination. The lower left photo is taken by a contracted social media influencer visiting A Casa do Porco Bar, using the cup that is designed for encouraging sharing. The lower right photo illustrates the integrated use of graffiti in a hipster ice-cream bar, providing a suitably gritty and colorful backdrop for Instagram portraits (“Me abraça & me beija” means “hug me & kiss me”).

Figure 3.

A paid influencer among the quirky designs adapted for social media shareability, making use of the pig-nose cup prop.

The visual preferences of platforms like Instagram are thus systematically transforming urban aesthetics. As Zukin (1996) suggested, the aesthetics of gentrification is shaped by the political economy of the city, as it is used to reference a process of price appreciation to instantiate such a process. As a result, a particular industrial aesthetics of Brooklyn has as a result become the universal style of gentrifying neighborhoods. In São Paulo’s Centro—despite few historic similarities with Brooklyn—the influence of this gentrification aesthetics can be seen in the frequently featured water pipes, naked burnt concrete walls and exposed brick. At the same time, the local influences of Brazilian architecture can be spotted, as the raw concrete walls and pillars flow in the soft round shapes characteristic of Niemeyer’s brutalism. But social media attention has added a new layer to this political economy, in turn transforming the aesthetics. The designs include elements that are clearly intended to work well on social media—such as colorful lights or circles that can frame scenes—but also the aesthetics of shareability: quirky, striking, silly, and colorful designs, such as hundreds of pink plush pigs or a giant plastic jaguar (see Figure 2), speaking to well-known biases of platforms like Instagram (Manovich, 2017).

Graffiti art is highlighted as a core element of this intersection between gentrification and Instagram aesthetics (MacDowall, 2019), and is frequently employed by the investors (Polson, 2022). It offers a colorful backdrop for selfies, while at the same time fits the story of Centro as a gritty and urban neighborhood (Zukin, 2008). One interviewee also points out that graffiti is a useful strategy for reducing vandalism, as the ethical code among graffiti artists dissuades covering other artists’ work.

The investors also emphasize the need to feed social media’s need for constant novelty. If the design and styles are updated, visitors have a reason to revisit and post new pictures. Because of this, many of the establishments redecorate and repaint as often as every few months.

But the consequences of mediatization run deeper than merely layers of paint and the providing of props. One investor describes recently choosing to invest in a particular building in part for its photogenic corridor, that he believed with the right set-up would drive “an absurd flock of photographers and instagrammers.”

Attention as the Product

For the investors, the shaping of aesthetics to fit social media is not something carried out merely in the pursuit of their own visibility, but it also seen as a core part of the value and experience provided to the costumers. As one investor put it: “Today, people don’t go to parties or festivals because of the music, or at least not only. They go for the experience, and a lot of the experience is about instagrammable places.” As scholars have argued, social media offer stages on which consumers can make visible their conspicuous consumption for a broader audience (Boy & Uitermark, 2023). The establishments are well-aware that they are part of this status dynamics, and that their customers are engaging in consumption in part as means of acquiring status and prestige through social media sharing (Manovich, 2016). A key task of the venues is hence to support their visitors in this endeavor: to offer an optimal stage on which they can create valuable social media content. Appealing and “likeable” pictures is thus seen an important part of the product that the guests are purchasing.

While providing props and backdrops are key help their guests capture viral and sharable photos is seen as part of the service provided, providing a stage for sharing is also about constructing their own business identity as desirable and high-status. To achieve this, the companies need to manage impressions and build a social media following that can be converted to paying customers who are themselves seeking to be associated to the brand. While building a brand identity has of course always been a key task of companies, building a brand is now tightly entangled with the logic of social media. “With social media, you need to tell a consistent story. And it needs to feel authentic.” The establishments in this sense have the same task as their guests: they need to construct an online persona that has status and influence.

The investors view this task as being centrally about the neighborhood where the establishment is located. Place is thus critical in the production and communication of status in that it provides a stage and marker for the enactment of lifestyle (Boy & Uitermark, 2023). “It’s about building an identity, which is part of the place where we are. We are part of Centro and we need to tell our story in a way that is consistent with where we are.” The establishments are in this sense “attaching their own biography to their ‘chosen’ residential location” (Savage et al., 2004, p. 29).

Doing so also means constructing and investing in the brand of the neighborhood itself. As Zukin et al. (2009) argue, restaurants and bars are not only products of gentrification, but also producers of social meaning and identity. The owners view social media as an important arena for pursuing these “discursive investments” in the neighborhood, and a group of them have gone together to create a hashtag to promote the neighborhood: #vemprocentro (“come to Centro”). The owners thus together seek to reinforce the framing of the neighborhood as an up-and-coming domain for high-end consumption. In this sense, the neighborhood itself exists on social media—and is subject to the same logic of hype and attention as everyone else.

Attention as Capital

While the investors see social media attention as part of the product they offer their customers, it is also something that they themselves procure by hiring influencers to build hype for their establishment. These influencers may post photos or videos from the restaurant—often interacting with the props and social media designs to contribute to their viral energy. Influencers may be formally contracted and paid, but others are hired in more informal ways, with micro-influencers often being paid only in free food or drinks. Influencers are seen as contributing to a flywheel dynamic in which attention attracts more attention: while the aesthetics of an establishment can be more or less “sharable,” its shareability also stems from receiving attention from other users. Urban virality is in this sense a form of “hype” that accumulates over time, as people want to be photographed in places that are already known on the platform.

The investors also pointed to a more surprising aspect: that attention was explicitly used as a form of capital within the urban economy. The restaurants and bars themselves function as a form of influencers for business higher up in the food chain. As one of the investors put it,

These large brands are good at outdoor marketing, television, and whatever, but they’re terrible at the online part. They don’t understand it, but they want to invest in it. So if you’re living online, and you can bring them a model with influencers and events connected to their brand, you’re already ahead. This is the moment we’re living in.

The value of social media clout for the investors hence stems also from the possibility of monetizing their capacity to control attention in relation to other brands. When negotiating with suppliers, one investor explains, it is standard practice to include the flow of social media attention in the contract. A bar or restaurant that has succeeded in building a strong online following and brand for a relevant social group can hence benefit significantly from marketing their influence, as it can result in steep discounts or even free supplies:

“When you open a bar, you negotiate with the suppliers. In the old model, when I negotiate with, say, Heineken—I give a volume that I promise to sell, and I get a certain amount of support. But these days, if you think only in this model, you’re dead. . . . Now, I also bring them a package, with like, list of events where all the artists will be posted holding a Heineken and we will share it on our social media. We already leave with a better deal, thanks to our social media communication. We sell attention to the brand, and it makes our contracts better, and it makes them choose our deal over others.”

The most direct way in which attention is contracted is that the establishment will themselves post photos that visibly include the brand (see Figure 4). But it may also involve more subtle strategies. One bar described putting a Heineken-branded fridge in proximity of an instagrammable area, so that it would seemingly incidentally show up in the background of selfies. Another contracted strategy is to put Heineken beers in the changing rooms, so that they might be visible in the backstage selfies of visiting artists. One owner put the kitchen brand in an instagrammable area, and in exchange received an entire restaurant kitchen for free.

Figure 4.

Less than subtle examples of photos in which a venue (left) and an influencer paid by a venue (right) feature beer brands in Instagram posts as part of a deal with a supplier that trades attention for reduced price of products.

The social media attention is in other words explicitly contracted, with a specified rate of conversation between likes and reais. The clubs are not only hiring influencers, but they are also themselves functioning as influencers for brands higher up in the attention economy food chain.

Discussion

While the impact of social media on the city may have been first noticed through quirky tales of accidental stumbling into urban virality, the capacity of social media to shape imaginaries and steer flows of people—and therefore flows of capital—have since become big business. As previous work has shown, social media enable places to “go viral” and emerge as a new form of online celebrities (Zhang et al., 2022; Zou, 2025). This article has examined the downstream consequences of this new reality, as the individuals who are central to shaping the built environment of the city respond to the pressures of social media, thereby enabling its logic to reshape the very built environment of the city.

This article has argued that while social media platforms may be diverse in their biases and characteristics, the platforms are all part and parcel of the same emerging all-pervasive economic logic: the pursuit of attention. As an essential precursor to the personal data whose accumulation defines contemporary digital capitalism (Sadowski, 2019), attention has become a highly valuable—and a growing literature has described how entire economies and large technological infrastructures have grown around its capture, manipulation, and control (Franck, 2019; Hwang, 2020). Social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok extract and sell profitable user data by creating marketplaces in which individuals compete for attention (Pedersen et al., 2021). By defining quantitative measures such as likes and shares, social media are transforming the amorphous shapeless concept of attention into discrete comparable units that can be bought and sold. By making attention measurable, social media has not only turned it into a tradeable commodity but also elevated it to one of the most valuable assets of our era.

The interviews with the São Paulo investors in this article revealed the ways in which social media attention has emerged as a key new form of urban capital, reshaping urban environments. Like economic capital, attention-as-capital is traded and contracted, flowing between actors in the city. Social media attention permeates every aspect of the investors’ work, to such extent that they see themselves not primarily in the business of food, beverages, or cultural experiences—but of attention. Bars and restaurants come to represent an important form of what we may call “attention intermediaries” (c.f., Zukin, 1996): they act as brokers of attention, exchanging attention capital into economic value, while curating aesthetics, narratives, and atmospheres that capture and sustain attention in an increasingly digitalized urban landscape. Digital attention is explicitly and even contractually exchanged and inextricably interlinked with the city and the physical world.

The investors’ establishments benefit in several ways from acting as attention intermediaries. First, most immediately, they are themselves dependent on attention to attract guests. As people today experience and explore the city through the interfaces of digital platforms, invisibility on social media means simply invisibility. Second, the investors view attention as a core part of the product that the establishments sell to their customers. As the investors put it, guests are no longer going to restaurants or clubs only for food or music, but for the possibility to take attractive photos that will receive a lot of likes and draw social media followers. In other words, social media allow consumers to make visible their conspicuous consumption in the pursuit not only of status, but of influence and attention capital—which they can use to pursue their interests; to convert to social or cultural capital, or even economic capital by themselves marketing their influence. Third, the establishment can market the attention capital to their suppliers, trading attention for reduced prices—or even in lieu of payment altogether. In the contemporary city, whoever controls social media attention controls the flow of people—and hence the flow of capital.

The urban literature on digital platforms has been characterized by two separate strands: one highlighting the material and economic dimensions of surveillance capitalism and the rise of data as key form of commodity, and the other emphasizing cultural dimensions and individual agency. This article has argued that the two strands cannot be treated as separate, as the logic of attention extraction defines the structure of interaction within which creativity, agency, and self-expression operate (Törnberg & Uitermark, 2025). As Zukin (1996) influentially argued, the culture of cities must be understood as inextricably interlinked with the urban economy, as aesthetic production has emerged become a core component of contemporary capitalism. Cultural symbols and meanings are not just byproducts of economic activity, but active forces that transform urban spaces and economic relationships—as cultural practices and aesthetic preferences drive urban development. The imperative of attention extraction has fundamentally altered the economic logic of cultural production that Zukin originally analyzed, as engagement metrics have supplanted traditional cultural legitimacy or artistic merit in defining visibility and cultural value, thereby redefining urban aesthetics and the cultures of cities.

Under the economic pressures of attention, the biases and logics of social media have become integrated into the underlying political economy of the city, and central to shaping the built environment, as digital virality has emerged as an important aim of urban design and architecture. The attention logic of social media has hence become integral part of the urban economy, seeping into every crevice of the city. In the context of São Paulo, where Instagram is seen as the dominant platform, and the city is hence rebuilt to be more “instagrammable.”

In summary, this article has highlighted how the platform economy must be understood as co-constituted with physical place: just as the contemporary city cannot be understood without reference to the attention economy, so too can the political economy of attention not be understood without reference to the city. The imperative of data accumulation has shaped a media era defined by a political economy of attention. As entertainment before it, attention capture is now emerging as the dominant institutional logic through which all other social spheres must operate. If, as Postman (1985) argued, the logic of the television was to cast everything in the language of entertainment, then social media should be understood as ushering in an era where everything—even our cities—is shaped by the pursuit of attention.

By drawing on empirical evidence from outside of the Global North, this article has also contributed to moving beyond the Anglocentric focus of the literature on social media and datafication, and to build theory from the contexts where most of the world’s population in fact live (Milan & Treré, 2019). São Paulo differs from the Euro-American context by the dynamics of its gentrification processes (Garmany & Richmond, 2020), the sophistication of its nightlife, as well as by the unusual dominance of Instagram and WhatsApp. However, the broader dynamics of an attention economy shaping the city identified by this article are likely to extend to locations across the world.