Social Media’s Midlife Crisis? How Public Discourse Imagines Platform Futures

Abstract

As long-standing social media platforms reinvent themselves and new platforms emerge, recent discourses about social media describe the platform landscape as marked by rising uncertainty and volatility. This article deconstructs popular media narratives of emerging, centralized social media platforms, including TikTok, BeReal, and Threads. Through a qualitative textual analysis of mainstream press discourses, we address the current existential juncture in the social media landscape by examining normative ideals of social media usage and the visions animated by these framings. Our study finds that social media’s imagined futures are refracted through the past, surfacing the fundamental importance of nostalgia in narratives of each platform’s emergence. We describe a persistent entanglement between the ongoing production of speculative discourses about future technologies and a yearning for affective experiences of bygone platforms through the concept of nostalgic anticipation. Nostalgic anticipation provides a framework for understanding how today’s narratives of technological change create idealized visions of a digital past while eliding critiques of the social media industry.

Introduction

Throughout the past several years, journalists, academics, and content creators have continued a long tradition of imagining the trajectories of individual social media platforms, and social media altogether, through cyclical tropes—whether that of the human life cycle, as social media grows from “infancy” to “adolescence,” or relationship timelines, as people fall out of love with social media after a “honeymoon phase” (Capon, 2023; Grayson, 2024; Nielsen & NM Incite, 2012). Most recently, however, these discursive groups have come to predict that social media’s life is reaching a point of crisis. Despite the continued growth of social media’s user base and consistent traffic, recent headlines speculate that social media is “doomed” or “in decline” as “the age of social media is ending” (Bogost, 2022; Hamburger, 2023; Jones, 2023). In an article titled “Social media is entering its flop era,” Jones (2022) observes that “Instagram is dying, Twitter is imploding, and TikTok is for a certain kind of person. Where does that leave us now?” Over two decades since the advent of social media as we know it (Sujon, 2021), current tech industry discourses are marked by a sense of stagnation, anxiety, reinvention, and a constant search for “the next new thing.”

In this tense discursive environment, it appears as if social media companies, the platforms they run, and the users they support, have arrived at a critical existential juncture. Current cultural narratives of social media pose the following question: What is social media for in today’s society—and what does its future look like? If this existential energy can be likened to any stage of the human life cycle, it is most akin to a midlife crisis, “a period of soul-searching” and “existential concerns” that some people face in middle age “brought about by the realization of aging, physical decline, or entrapment in unwelcome, restrictive roles” (Raypole, 2021; Wethington, 2000, p. 86). Although social media’s actual “lifespan” is unknown, its present and anticipated futures appear to promise dynamics of uncertainty and change.

Though the social media ecosystem has never been stable—with platforms emerging, evolving, aging, and closing (Corry, 2022, 2024; McCammon & Lingel, 2022)—in public discourse, the 2020s have appeared particularly volatile. Dominant companies have switched names, branding, and, in some cases, owners: In 2021, Facebook became Meta; in 2023, Twitter became X under the ownership of Elon Musk. New platforms have also emerged to address dissatisfaction with existing services and offer alternatives to discursive subgroups, such as the decentralized structures of Mastodon and Bluesky or the reactive politics of Truth Social. At the same time, dominant platform companies and their properties have continued to be scrutinized by governments, the public, and individuals, for their economic dominance, shaping of speech, and impact on user wellbeing (Srnicek, 2016; Vaidhyanathan, 2018; Van Dijck et al., 2018). Despite this scrutiny, behemoth companies like Meta and Alphabet consistently maintain control over much of the social media landscape, subject to sparse regulation (e.g., Ghosh, 2021; Jackson, 2021).

Into this fray, several new, centralized social media platforms have emerged and become popular around the world, with various degrees of lasting success. These include TikTok, the video platform owned by Chinese company ByteDance, which launched in its present incarnation in 2018; the French photo-sharing app BeReal, which launched in 2020 and asks users to post a snapshot once daily; and the Meta-owned Threads, which launched in 2023 and offers similar functionality to Twitter while being integrated with other Meta properties. As these sites have debuted, the popular press has chronicled their adoption and impact, and in doing so, has both reflected and constructed dominant discourses around normative social media use in the present moment, while presenting future-oriented “technological imaginaries” (Ferrari, 2020), or collective beliefs about the role of these technologies in society. Journalism plays a vital role in “setting the agenda” for public discourse, and journalists contribute to shaping public opinion and reception of emerging platforms (e.g., McCombs, 2005). A wealth of research has demonstrated that the societal narratives we hold about media technologies have political, economic, and social implications (Gillespie, 2010; Poell et al., 2021; Sujon, 2021; Van Dijck, 2013). We build upon this work to investigate social media’s imagined, emerging futures by deconstructing popular media narratives of TikTok, BeReal, and Threads as emerging platforms. Through a qualitative textual analysis of mainstream press discourses, this article addresses the current existential juncture in the social media landscape by surfacing both the normative ideals of social media usage and the broader social visions animated by these framings.

Our study finds that social media’s imagined futures are filtered through its past. Our analysis underscores the fundamental importance of cultural memory in technological imaginaries, particularly during periods of change and crisis in the broader sociotechnical systems they support (Kalmbach et al., 2020). More specifically, the narratives that journalists co-construct about emerging social media platforms are enmeshed through shared threads of nostalgia. Media nostalgia is an “affective modality of engaging with the past” through recollections of personal memories and aesthetics, often leveraged as a means of coping with changing media ecologies (Butkowski, 2023; Menke, 2017; Niemeyer & Keightley, 2020, p. 1641). We argue that popular discourses imbue each platform with a different formation of media nostalgia—TikTok’s nostalgic expression, BeReal’s nostalgic affordances, and Threads’ nostalgic success—rooted in that platform’s distinct technological features, userbase, and corporate mythos. In doing so, we view nostalgia through a critical lens, using the term nostalgic anticipation to describe the persistent entanglement between the rising production and urgency of speculative discourses about future technologies and a yearning for affective experiences of technologies past.

Ultimately, this article contributes to research in platform studies, communication, and the social construction of technologies by interrogating the roles of temporality and emergence in a new media landscape that is no longer quite as “new” as it once was. Prior research examines the role of memory in digital spaces (e.g., Butkowski, 2022; Jacobsen & Beer, 2021; Kang et al., 2023; Villa-Nicholas, 2019), but this study is dedicated to theorizing at the interstitial junctures of media hybridity (Chadwick, 2017). Our analysis is not only transcending the binaries of “old” and “new” media; it also acknowledges and theorizes the hidden boundaries between “new” and “newer” media. Within a global news cycle predicated upon the constant production of speculation, we examine how nostalgic anticipation can simultaneously ease technological transitions and contribute to obfuscating more insidious aspects of platform capitalism.

Narratives about media and technological change

The journalistic discourses sampled above are examples of what Natale (2016) has called “biographies of media,” or narratives about media emergence, development, and decline. Literature from communication and media studies has shown how storytelling about media is both indicative, because analysis of these stories reveals broader cultural mores, and socially consequential, because stories shape how individuals and groups think about the role of media in their lives. Histories of communication technologies, including analyses of artifacts like telephones, books and e-readers, and the Web, have shown how these narratives help social groups emotionally and culturally make sense of emergent media forms and the social changes that accompany them (Corry, 2021; Marvin, 1988; Natale, 2016; Silverstone & Haddon, 1996). Emergence, or when technologies are considered “new,” these accounts show, is a valuable time to understand their relation to the desires and concerns of a given moment; as Sturken and Thomas (2004) have noted, “emergent technologies are a . . . Rorschach test for the collective concerns of a particular age” (p. 1).

This literature also illustrates the ways in which media change narratives often subscribe to well-worn, if inaccurate, tropes about medium emergence and evolution. For instance, a common narrative theme implies that the debut of one medium will replace or destroy another, even though histories of technology prove that is not cleanly the case (Ballatore & Natale, 2016; Boczkowski et al, 2022; Edgerton, 2008; Lepore, 2014; Marvin, 1988). Other prominent themes in discourse about media change include broad societal concern over new media’s relationship with social deviance, especially concerning young people. These “moral panics” have accompanied the debut of novel media forms from comic books to video games to the internet (Facer, 2012; Nicholas & O’Malley, 2013; Orben, 2020; Springhall, 1998).

Importantly, media narratives also serve ideological functions (Sturken et al., 2004). These narratives are not just neutral descriptors of “what is going on,” but rather, support particular social, economic, and political arrangements (Gillespie, 2010; Lipartito, 2003; Natale, 2016). In this way, media narratives function as “frames,” rhetorical structures providing meaningful storylines or organizing principles, that influence broader cultural associations with a topic (Goffman, 1974; Simon & Jerit, 2007). Foundational literature on media narratives largely draws on analyses of historical media technologies, studying their introduction and evolution (Marvin, 1988; Sturken et al., 2004). There are few studies that explicitly tie narratives about technological change together with social media. Instead, these historical studies provide a foundation from which to understand broader arcs and impacts of media change for other technological systems, like social media.

Nostalgia in media narratives

Nostalgia, or a longing for the past, runs through scholarly discourse and broad cultural understandings about media technology emergence and change. Media is core to modern nostalgia, Boym (2001) has argued, as each new medium “affects the relationship between distance and intimacy that is at the core of nostalgic sentiment” (p. 884). Media technologies are inherently related to nostalgia’s toggling between past and present, as they both represent the past in the present while reflecting cultural symbolism of past eras (Edgerton, 2008; Gitelman, 2006; Rahm-Skågeby & Carlsson, 2021). Scholars have noted that nearly all changes in technology—even computer software—are accompanied by feelings of nostalgia for older media (Ballatore & Natale, 2016; Sobchack, 1999). In the case of a transition from physical media to digital media, nostalgia often invokes the material qualities and perceived authenticity of the pre-digital form (Ballatore & Natale, 2016), just as digital technologies often adopt aesthetics associated with related older forms of media (e.g., digital photo filters simulating analog photography; Instagram’s Polaroid-inspired logo) (Niemeyer & Keightley, 2020). Nostalgia is especially prevalent in narratives about social media emergence that we address in this article.

Nostalgia for past media can support individuals and communities during times of social transition (Butkowski, 2023; Menke, 2017), but it is also deeply political (Cifor, 2022). Research on nostalgia’s societal implications has associated it with longings for an era of greater conservatism, before expansions of rights for marginalized groups in many Western countries (Lammers, 2023). In this sense, nostalgia is often understood as a self-indulgent obstacle to social change rather than an arbiter of progress. However, research has also emphasized the liberatory and activist potentials of nostalgic thought (Bonnett, 2010; Cifor, 2022). As we will discuss, nostalgia is a primary lens for describing social media platform emergence that takes on particular socio-political valences when included in these narratives.

Social media narratives

There are few studies that examine how social media is framed as a topic within news media and broader public discourses (Lev-On, 2018). Limited existing research has surfaced themes from media change literature, including moral panics around children’s wellbeing (Marwick, 2008), and medium replacement in the context of platform emergence and closure (McCammon & Lingel, 2022). Social media has also been subject to the narrative sorting between “old” and “new” technologies (Chadwick, 2017; Lesage & Natale, 2019), and in this sorting is represented as a quintessential “new” media technology, sweeping in unprecedented changes with little connection to a past. Yet journalistic discourses emerging in the early and mid-2020s that focus on stagnation, crisis, and endings, signal a shift in how discursive groups talk about the social media environment.

While social media scholarship has limited engagement with media change narratives, it is possible to see narrative arcs that accompany social media platform evolution over roughly the last 25 years. We track narratives beginning in the era when social networking sites became a recognizable term in tandem with “Web 2.0” in the late 1990s and early 2000s (Sujon, 2021). Early narratives about social media adopted broader ideologies about personal expression associated with internet technologies but framed them within a new creative and participatory realm in the early 2000s (Turner, 2006). As Ankerson (2018) shows, these narratives served economic functions, helping Silicon Valley investors market a new era for web-based technologies that was discursively distanced from the dot-com crash. In the mid-2000s to early 2010s, platforms continued to be framed as places for “egalitarian” expression by companies, narratives supporting their ability to function with few regulations (Gillespie, 2010). Popular discourses also optimistically understood platforms’ political potential, through “hashtag activism” (Pond & Lewis, 2019). In the late 2010s and early 2020s, a “techlash” centered around social media platforms grew, particularly in the wake of 2016 US election’s Cambridge Analytica scandal and revelations about platforms’ roles in promoting misinformation. In this techlash, diverse groups questioned the social, political, and economic effects of social media platforms and companies (Heaven, 2018).

Yet the platform landscape and the narratives about it are shifting. Especially as broader public discourses gesture toward themes of existential crisis, à la the midlife crisis, it is important to understand how social media as an entity is being discussed today, and the broader ideologies that these narratives reveal and support. Moreover, recent literature on platform evolution and closure has highlighted how temporality, the passage of time, and nostalgia, are factors for understanding the socio-political impact of social media (Burgess & Baym, 2020; Corry, 2023; Lingel, 2020; Miltner & Gerrard, 2021). It is important to recognize that, despite its traditional narrative association with novelty, social media has a past that may resonate into its present.

Our study explores these intersections by asking the following questions: How do journalists construct media narratives about emerging social media platforms today? How do these narratives perpetuate or upset existing narrative tropes about social media? And, what kinds of futures are supported by these framings?

Methodology

We conducted a qualitative textual analysis of news articles about TikTok, BeReal, and Threads as three social media platforms that grew to prominence during the recent juncture of social media uncertainty (Chen, 2023; Kuckartz, 2014). Capturing media narratives of emergence allows us to deconstruct how journalists interpret the current social media ecosystem and articulate their visions for its future, particularly within a landscape dominated by long-standing tech companies such as Meta, Alphabet, and X, just as it facilitates a broader understanding of social ideologies (Sturken & Thomas, 2004).

We selected the platform case studies to highlight different facets of social media emergence, including TikTok as a growing platform behemoth, BeReal as a fledgling platform with relatively short-lived success, and Threads as a newer platform specifically designed to respond to critiques of an existing one. Each of the case studies uses a traditional centralized platform model, but the cases also differ in their branding and major affordances. TikTok is a short-form video app, known for its algorithmic “for you page” feed. The Chinese platform has skyrocketed in popularity, despite attracting bans in several countries. BeReal is a photo-sharing app that encourages all users to post snapshots from their front and back smartphone cameras once per day. Since launching, its user base drastically grew and then halved less than a year later (Gerrard, 2023). Finally, Threads is a microblogging platform and Meta’s response to widespread dissatisfaction with Elon Musk’s management of Twitter/X. It is tied directly to users’ Instagram accounts, making initial signup simple. See Table 1 for a full breakdown of each of our app case studies.

Table 1.

Descriptions of Emerging Platforms Analyzed.

	TikTok	BeReal	Threads
Parent Company	Bytedance (China)	Voodoo (France)	Meta (USA)
Description	Short video app with an algorithmically curated “for you page” feed.	Photo sharing app that prompts users randomly each day to post a photo.	A microblogging app attached to users’ Instagram accounts.
Launch	September 2017	January 2020	July 2023
Active Monthly Users as of 2024 a	1.5 billion	21.6 million	275 million
N Articles Sampled	100	51	100

a

Mehta, 2024; Statsup, 2024; Woodward, 2024.

We gathered our corpus by conducting three searches on ProQuest News & Newspapers for global English-language news articles concerning TikTok, BeReal, and Threads. While we limited the search to articles in English, we chose to sample from global sources, as opposed to sources based in only one nation, because of the international corporations and user populations of the platforms and because research has shown how consistent sociotechnical ideologies exceed national borders (English-Lueck, 2017). We sampled the 100 most “relevant” articles in terms of keyword salience (ProQuest, n.d.) from each platform during the first 12–18 months after its first mention in the database, which allowed us to gather articles with an especially high concentration of platform mentions (e.g., articles that most frequently discussed of TikTok, BeReal, or Threads). This resulted in a sample of N = 251 articles, including N = 100 articles on TikTok between April 2018 and April 2019 (primarily from Indian, US, and UK outlets), N = 51 articles on BeReal between April 2022 and October 2023 (primarily from US outlets), and N = 100 articles on Threads between May 2023 and May 2024 (primarily from US and UK outlets). US outlets included The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal among others; UK outlets included The Guardian, The Financial Times, and The Telegraph among others; and Indian outlets included The Economic Times, The Hindustan Times, and The Times of India among others. Articles derived primarily from newspaper sections on technology, but they were also present to a lesser extent in sections on lifestyle and culture, business and finance, politics, and international news. The platform-specific starting dates for our corpus do not necessarily coincide with the first year of each platform’s existence but rather when they began attracting media attention. Despite extending our search timeline for BeReal to 18 months rather than the initial 12, we were only able to find 51 articles mentioning the platform. This could be because BeReal is significantly smaller than TikTok and Threads and because its parent company, Voodoo, is less powerful than Bytedance or Meta.

We used DeDoose to collaboratively analyze the articles through an iterative process that involved close reading and immersion in the texts accompanied by multiple rounds of emergent coding to identify key themes (Tracy, 2013). We worked to support the credibility of our analysis through ongoing discussion of coding to consolidate categories and navigate discrepancies paired with peer debriefing (Kuckartz, 2014; Lincoln & Guba, 1985). Our approach prioritizes depth in our analysis of articles through sustained, immersive engagement in the corpus. Salient codes included normative descriptions of the platforms as highly authentic, expressive, and connective in comparison with pre-existing platforms as well as technological imaginaries that envision them as “killer apps,” solution-oriented, and faddish.

Results

We found that journalistic narratives of TikTok, BeReal, and Threads as emerging platforms are imbued with cultural memory and, more specifically, media nostalgia. They are animated by an affective yearning for the feelings and aesthetics of the early—or at least earlier—internet as the primary lens for imagining how emerging platforms can, should, and will shape social media’s future. We propose that the three case studies embody three formations of nostalgia: TikTok’s nostalgic expression, BeReal’s nostalgic affordances, and Threads’ nostalgic success. As will be seen here, these forms of nostalgia do not emerge simply from reporting on the platform itself, but rather emerge from reporting on platforms as sociotechnical entities that involve user groups, organizations and their leaders, and platform infrastructure. Together, these media narratives showcase a tension present throughout the corpus, the push and pull of anticipation for the future and nostalgia for the past. See all press cited in the Appendix.

TikTok: nostalgic expression

TikTok is a short video platform initially launched in 2017 by the Chinese company Bytedance. The platform grew significantly when Bytedance purchased the similar music-based short video app Music.ly in late 2017 and merged the two platforms, expanding its reach in Western markets. TikTok is known for its “for you page” feed, an endless scroll of short videos served up to users by an algorithm that tailors content recommendations based on previous user engagement. Discussions of TikTok’s emergence in news media centered on a dialog between two contrasting yet complementary discursive forces. Journalists present the platform through what we call nostalgic expression, describing the creativity and “kookiness” of TikTok’s user-generated content as reminiscent of the unfettered expression that they remember from earlier days of social media. At the same time, journalists in India and the United States also echoed a cyclical media narrative of moral panic by expressing an outpouring of concern for the effects of TikTok on children and adolescents (Orben, 2020). As we illustrate below, moral panic is not a given for emerging social media platforms today; neither BeReal nor Threads inspired similar panics. We argue that the media narratives of TikTok as nostalgic and dangerous are not merely simultaneous but also intertwined.

Journalists frequently described TikTok’s expressive potentials by framing the app as quirky and transportive; in the words of one journalist from The Guardian, “weird is the lifeblood of TikTok” (Cresci, 2019). The platform’s for you page served as “a gateway to a bizarre world” or “a visual and sonic barrage” populated with content like “dance routines by awkward teens,” “inscrutable memes,” and “astoundingly creative editing” (Bradshaw, 2019; Zolfagharifard, 2019). Journalist Abby Ohlheiser (2018) for The Washington Post described TikTok’s for you page as swiping through “an endless collection of rabbit holes” made up of countless community niches and trends, all with their own idiosyncratic cultures. Shanghai Daily (2018) called TikTok “the express-yourself video app.”

Despite what they discussed as TikTok’s enigmatic qualities, journalists shared excitement and optimism about the platform, largely by comparing it with feelings and sensations that they “haven’t felt in a long time while on the internet.” Kevin Roose (2018) writing for The New York Times sums up common refrains among several North American journalists describing TikTok as a less corporate, safer, and more creative social media—a “throwback” of sorts. He writes,

It’s that rarest of internet creatures: a place where people can let down their guards, act silly with their friends and sample the fruits of human creativity without being barraged by abusive trolls or algorithmically amplified misinformation. It’s a throwback to a time before the commercialization of internet influence, when web culture consisted mainly of harmless weirdos trying to make each other laugh.

Roose describes a vision of early TikTok in opposition to other popular social media platforms in the techlash era, rife with trolls and misinformation. He characterizes TikTok as an alternative, populated by the creative expression of “harmless weirdos.” Indeed, TikTok’s expressive potentials were frequently discussed as an opportunity for renewal of social media. For example, Choudhary (2019) writes of political expression on TikTok leading up to India’s 2019 elections by saying that the platform “has brought humour and fun back on the Internet” as “the number of people abusing you is fewer.”

While narratives of TikTok as a paragon of social media expression proliferated, they were accompanied by a deluge of fear-based narratives concerning the safety of vulnerable users, especially children and adolescents. Two major regulatory events dominated the conversation in early coverage of TikTok. The first was a US federal court order filed in February 2019 to protect children’s privacy by barring the platform from collecting personal information such as names, email addresses, and location from children without their parents’ consent based on previous violations by Music.ly (e.g., United News of Bangladesh, 2019). The order resulted in a $5.7 million fine exacted by the US Federal Trade Commission during our sampling time frame. The second, more prominent event within the corpus was India’s TikTok ban, which did not go into effect until June 2020 but began accumulating reports around April 2019, when India’s high court ordered the ban (e.g., Yuan et al., 2019).

The concerns fueling panic were markedly similar in newspapers around the globe. They considered the safety of young girls especially, mentioning TikTok dangers related to “caustic comments and potential abuse,” “pornographic content,” and TikTok as “a choice hunting ground for sexual predators” (Shanghai Daily, 2018). However, for countries like India and the United States, foreign affairs, national security, and conflict with China specifically also played a role in regulatory actions against TikTok. Coverage of these issues largely gravitated toward threats to privacy. For example, one article in Daily News & Analysis: Mumbai (2019) notes,

While the case of TikTok relates to obscenity and sexual innuendos, generally speaking, the Indian government has been wary of Chinese apps that have come to dominate the Indian ecosystem. In periodic advisories issued to troops and other security agencies, particularly those on the LaC [Line of Actual Control], the Intelligence Bureau (IB) has warned that China could be collecting vital information about Indian security installations through its popular mobile phone apps and devices.

For these journalists, and the government narratives they are representing, concerns about Chinese influence and interference were melded with, or perhaps obscured by, concerns about the health and safety of young girls.

TikTok’s nostalgic expression and global moral panics may seem to be competing, counterintuitive narratives. However, the freewheeling creativity and unfettered expression that journalists value so much in the app, founded in an especially young user base, also create a fertile ground for fear and panic. Just as moral panic is a routine part of introducing new technologies, expression that harkens back to “social media’s golden days” also harkens back to long-standing fears about social media’s impacts on youth. Together, these narratives evoke a note of technological determinism, suggesting that technologies themselves, rather than the social or structural factors undergirding them, can simultaneously liberate and disproportionately harm users.

BeReal: nostalgic affordances

BeReal was launched in 2020 by two French entrepreneurs and started to gain widespread attention in 2022 (Seitz, 2022). BeReal users are prompted once each day to post photos from their front and back cameras, and have 2 minutes to do so, or their post will be marked as late. Narratives about BeReal focused on the temporal and social connections enabled through the app’s functions. Journalists argued that the app offers what we are calling nostalgic affordances, or a user experience that recalls early and mid-2000s social media platforms through the inclusion of specific app features—for instance, limited time to take a photo, which prompted spontaneous and “authentic” self-presentation—and the exclusion of other features, for instance, photo filters. We refer to these feature discussions as tied to “affordances,” a contested term referring to the ways a technology may “cue” its user by enabling and constraining certain behaviors (Bucher & Helmond, 2017; Davis, 2020; Nagy & Neff, 2015), because journalists routinely framed them in this way, drawing connections between features and the experiences they believed were “afforded” to users within the app.

Articles addressing BeReal as their primary subject (versus articles where BeReal was mentioned) always explained its basic premise and features, and then connected those features to themes of unvarnished authenticity and “real life” mundanity. Journalists, for instance, discussed the app’s photo alert. In the Wall Street Journal, one reporter describes how

you receive an alert from the new app at a random time of day, and you have a mere two seconds to take your snapshots. That means no time to seek out a seascape, or even a happy hour, and little chance at covering up the errant zit. (Roberts, 2022)

In The New York Times, another reporter noted how BeReal publicly displays violations of the app’s temporal rules: “You can post after the 2-minute window closes, but all your friends will be notified that you were late; you can retake your day’s photo, but your friends will know that, too,” arguing that these features underscored the app’s raison d’etre: “That’s sort of the point: Social media, without spice” (Nierenberg, 2022). Journalists gave examples of content from their BeReal feeds that emphasized everyday behavior. Photos show people “in class and on the road,” often ending up with “images of the photographer looking down at their feet” (Brown & James, 2022). Users are “at home, at work, commuting. It’s an unglamorous scroll” (Nierenberg, 2022). These photos remind users that others’ lives are “just as dull and non-photogenic” as your own (Dickson, 2022), that “your mostly boring life is OK–in fact, it’s completely normal” (Dawson, 2022).

Journalists routinely compared these authenticity-enabling features and “aggressively mundane” content (Oremus, 2022) to two related counterpoints: the “curated” user culture of current social media apps like Instagram, and memories of using social media platforms from the early and mid-2000s. In one article, the app was hailed as the “anti-Instagram,” because its photos were not the “perfectly curated, overly filtered content that has become the social media gold standard” (Dawson, 2022). (Of the BeReal sample’s 51 articles, 50 mentioned Instagram.) Articles contrasting the BeReal experience to the “filtered” aesthetic experience then likewise compared BeReal with affective, nostalgic experiences of platforms past. Two representative quotes describe this sentiment, with BeReal being, in the words of Haigney (2022):

. . . a throwback, with the feel of an early 2000s vlog or an old Facebook status. This is a version of social media that circles back toward its origins: oversharing, maybe, but the oversharing of minutia that will disappear the next day, instead of building a permanent record of some alternate self.

Similarly, Herrmann (2022) noted how

BeReal markets its experience as a return to rawness and authenticity, but, at least to this user, it can feel more gauzy and nostalgic, like a reproduction of the experience of joining one of the dominant social networks when they all still felt like toys.

Journalistic discourse about BeReal filters the user experience on the app through the lens of the past, framing its features and content through memories of social media at its “origins,” with the “oversharing of minutia” and carefree user engagement with these social “toys.” Juxtaposing fatigue with “inauthentic” contemporary social media platforms and their behemoth tech companies with the innocent authenticity and positive mundanity associated with early- and mid- 2000s platforms, articles addressing BeReal subtly related to discourses of the “techlash,” recalling a time on the internet before users were “hyperalert to . . . its dark underbelly” (Haigney, 2022). Other accounts noted how dominant platform companies like Meta would need to pay attention to the ways that users were engaging with “nostalgic” experiences like BeReal, showing that they need to “nail the present to move into the future even as the world is taking a step back” (Forman, 2022).

Discussion of social media’s dangers was largely absent from articles about BeReal, which became especially visible when compared with articles about TikTok and Threads. If anything, narratives related to social media dangers only surfaced insofar as the app was offered as a positive alternative to threatening experiences elsewhere. At the same time, unlike discourses about TikTok or Threads, BeReal lacks a dominant, juggernaut company behind it, has comparatively fewer users, and rapidly fell out of favor in news media discourse.

Ultimately, BeReal’s nostalgic affordances harken to a particular vision of social media as a space where authentic versions of the self could be fostered in a non-threatening environment. Of course, the idea that social media platforms ever offered a non-threatening, egalitarian space for all users is a myth, one further perpetuated in these accounts. Moreover, by positioning BeReal’s features as enabling this nostalgic user experience, articles implicitly position a platform’s configuration of features, rather than broader structural change or government regulation, as offering remedies to the issues surfaced in techlash critiques.

Threads: nostalgic success

Threads is the microblogging app launched by Meta in July 2023. Attached to users’ Instagram accounts, Threads is structured similarly to Twitter and other text-forward public discussion platforms. Accounts of Threads were dominated by stories of platform competition: between Threads and Twitter/X, and between each platform’s owner, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. (The vast majority of articles mention one or both CEOs’ names; in the 51 articles sampled for BeReal, one mentions their founders’ names.) They were also dominated by descriptions of the platform’s growth, as articles routinely mentioned the large number of users who flocked to the platform after launching. Reflecting the focus on the app’s leadership, its dramatic competition with rivals, and the tone of excitement around its swift growth, narratives about Threads were marked by visions of nostalgic success, or cultural excitement for a repeat version of Facebook’s origin story, with rapid, global growth and a triumphant CEO in Zuckerberg.

The platform, journalists noted, “swept through the instant communications landscape with record breaking speed” (Martin & Sambajon, 2023), “after less than 48 hours of existence totaled 70 million users,” that “within a week signed up more than 100 million users” (Ulin, 2023). Articles often related growth statistics to Threads’ impact on Twitter/X–that “its debut coincided with an apparent decline in Twitter’s internet traffic” (French, 2023)–or to speculations about whether Threads could sustain its growth to become the internet’s “digital town square,” displacing Twitter (Isaac, 2023). While decentralized networks were mentioned, they were considered trivial compared with the Twitter/Threads competition: “Other platforms trying to capitalize on Twitter’s weakness—such as Tumblr, Nostr, Spill, Mastodon and Bluesky—are all much smaller than Meta,” Kelvin Chan (2023), an AP reporter, wrote. Accounts discussing Threads’ growth ascribed to long-standing narrative tropes about media replacement–that an ascendant medium would destroy and replace an existing medium, rather than co-existing. In this case, rather than replacement being tied to the debut of a new medium (e.g., e-readers replacing paper books; Ballatore & Natale, 2016), it is tied to a new platform with similar features to the platform it is ostensibly replacing.

In a Los Angeles Times op-ed, Ulin (2023) noted that the “Threads-Twitter throwdown” was a platform-based “proxy war” for billionaire owners Musk and Zuckerberg. Articles in our sample framed Threads’ debut similarly, frequently mentioning the antagonistic sparring—figurative as well as literal—between Musk and Zuckerberg. Referencing an online exchange in which the two founders had seemingly agreed to an MMA-style “cage fight,” an article in the Wall Street Journal quipped that the Threads’ debut was “no cage match, but Mark Zuckerberg may be still hitting Elon Musk right where it counts” (Gallagher, 2023). Articles chronicled the CEOs exchanging critical public statements about the other’s platform and discussed how Musk was pursuing legal action against Threads for using trade secrets. Based on these frequent mentions, “competition between platforms and CEOs” was overwhelmingly the most prominent code in our Threads sample.

When describing this rivalry, articles painted Zuckerberg in a positive light, with writers sometimes reflecting on their surprise that they were rooting for him. “Elon Musk has done the once unimaginable: He has helped revive Mark Zuckerberg’s Silicon Valley mojo,” wrote Higgins (2023), noting that Zuckerberg’s contrast from Musk helped him rebound from the techlash:

Zuckerberg was cast in recent years as Silicon Valley’s poster child for the Great Tech Backlash. It was a painful fall for the wunderkind who helped usher in the social-media age almost 20 years ago as a baby-faced, Harvard University student who co-founded The Facebook in his dorm room.

Zuckerberg’s own posts about Threads were often quoted in these articles, and tended to paint him as a reasonable leader compared with quotes from Musk. However, writers noted that despite the cultural shift in attitude around Zuckerberg, Threads could have the same issues as other Meta sites. “Still, this is Meta,” users should “expect this to just be another app that feeds into” their data streams (Stern & Alcántara, 2023).

The narrative themes that emerge in articles addressing Threads–record-breaking growth, dramatic rivalries, and positive excitement around its founder’s success–recall the mythology around Zuckerberg’s founding of Facebook, and feed into a vision of Threads that is marked by nostalgic success. Sometimes, this recalling of the Facebook founding story was explicit. As Stern and Alcántara (2023) put it,

Is this it? A real Twitter competitor? It sure looks like the closest thing to it. . . . The app hit 30 million sign-ups as of Thursday morning, [Zuckerberg] posted. But as Zuckerberg (or an actor playing him) was once famously told, sort of: “Thirty million sign-ups isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion sign-ups.”

While picking up other major themes around growth and rivalry, the article also recalls the mythologized founding story of Facebook, referencing a scene from the 2010 movie The Social Network. The biopic follows Zuckerberg as he launches Facebook, experiences the social and economic perks of Silicon Valley success, and triumphs after interpersonal and legal troubles with the site’s would-be co-founders. It is this version of Facebook’s rise that is recalled in reporting on Threads. As Rodriguez (2023) put it, with Threads, Zuckerberg “has become more emboldened, acting intentionally and doing so in a cutthroat manner akin to that of his early years running Facebook, or as some have described it, a return to ‘OG Mark.’”

In envisioning nostalgic success for Threads, both Meta and its founder are re-written into the narrative arc of Facebook’s origin myth. This trope—of bold male inventors who achieve financial and social success through their technologies, thereby displaying the transformative potential of emerging technologies—is more than a century old (Kelly, 2020). It accompanies a trope of media replacement and “killer apps,” too. In reconstituting these narratives around Threads, accounts create a culturally legible narrative of recovery and triumph for Meta, its platforms, Zuckerberg and social media, while maintaining the status quo of platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2016).

Discussion

Examining media accounts about new, centralized social media platforms surfaces enduring themes in public understandings of media and technology change, while also pointing to a filter of nostalgia that journalists use to understand and communicate about social media’s present and emerging future. In discussing these themes, we show how narratives about media and technological change—an analytical focus that has often been used to understand historical technologies, and their visions of mediated futures—can be a fruitful lens for research on emerging sociotechnical objects, too. Through this discussion, we argue that narratives of emerging technologies surface a discursive phenomenon of nostalgic anticipation of future technologies that greatly informs the narrative tenor of “crisis” pervading the current platform landscape.

Despite different ideological leanings and cultural backgrounds, narratives of each platform tended to be quite internally consistent, especially for BeReal and Threads. Journalists expressed elaborated versions of the traditional hopes, fears, and panics that accompany the rise of new media technologies broadly construed, repeating anxiety over the impact of these systems on young people, and young women more specifically. This was most present in accounts of TikTok, where journalists captured concern over young people’s physical safety, sexual purity, and privacy. However, fears were placed within new contexts, including children’s privacy in the context of an app owned by a Chinese company. Journalistic accounts also rehashed “positive” ideals associated with the internet and Web 2.0, including the notion that these emerging platforms could foster cultural participation, authenticity, and expression. However, rather than these ideals surfacing in comparison with broadcast media and traditional publishing—as in earlier eras—emerging platforms were framed as fostering these ideals when compared with long-standing, dominant platforms, including Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook. In reconstituting technological hopes and fears in the context of emerging social media platforms, it is possible to see how social media may no longer function as the quintessential “new” media in today’s public discourse, a technology with little relation to a past.

Instead, our analysis has shown how the anticipated futures of social media are filtered through a yearning for ideals and affective experiences associated with social media’s past. TikTok inspired nostalgia for a creative, community feel of early social media, in the form of nostalgic expression. BeReal’s features encourage users to create snapshots reminiscent of a more unvarnished platform ecosystem, with nostalgic affordances. Finally, the rise of Threads as an opponent to Musk’s altered version of Twitter/X harkens back to the rise of Zuckerberg in the early 2000s as an innovative tech visionary, a nostalgic success.

It is important to ask about which social visions are animated through the instantiations of mediated nostalgia surfaced in our analysis. What cultural dynamics do these nostalgia narratives fuel, entrench, and obfuscate? Where do we go from here? While journalistic accounts proffered visions of early 2000s social media as one that was authentic, fun, and creative for broad swathes of users, research demonstrates that social media and the internet at large have never truly been havens for free expression or removed from corporate influence (Croeser, 2016; Nelson et al., 2001). By promoting nostalgia in visions of social media’s future, these journalists index their own privilege—that they were able to experience platforms in the way they describe—while also perpetuating an imaginary of future technologies returning digital cultures and individual users to a past that never existed. Moreover, these visions—of a pre-techlash era of social media (Heaven, 2018)—help elide critiques about deleterious social, political, and economic effects. Just as Web 2.0 discourses were used to rebrand internet technologies after the dot-com crash of 1999-2000, paving the way for renewed economic investment and public interest (Ankerson, 2018), nostalgic discourses about emerging platforms analyzed in this article help the social media industry distance itself from public critiques that emerged in the mid- to late-2010s.

Technological imaginaries, especially about social media, maintain a persistent focus on novelty and innovation (Vinsel & Russell, 2020), which might initially seem counter to discourses of nostalgia. However, platform expectancy has become routine in the social media industry. As platforms repeatedly grow, thrive, and conglomerate or fold, the industry encourages users to look toward the future by expecting constant novelty and growth, even if this means larger platforms eventually absorbing the features and cultures of smaller ones. The ongoing production of journalism likewise relies on ongoing reporting about social media’s changes. These imaginaries promote an idea of a social media landscape that is constantly changing—even entering a point of midlife crisis. They belie the fact that social media has remained relatively stable over the past 20 years, with consistent economic structures and ever-growing companies.

The nostalgia that pervades these accounts is inherently tied to an equally important logic of anticipation under capital. Adams et al. (2009) argue that contemporary cultural logics have become increasingly oriented toward anticipation and the efficacy of predicting and preparing for possible futures by optimizing the present. This mutual yearning—for feelings of the past in nostalgia and knowledge of the future in anticipation—provides a generative crossroads for understanding the current existential juncture of social media narratives in the popular press. We understand this juncture as founded in nostalgic anticipation.

Drawing from existing definitions of anticipatory nostalgia, which describes the sadness associated with having to end a beautiful moment as it unfolds, both in media practices and beyond (Niemeyer & Keightley, 2020; Wiebes, 2018), we understand nostalgic anticipation as the ongoing production of imagined platform futures founded in a yearning for the past. Importantly, however, the nostalgic futures envisioned for platform-based communication arise not through social media alternatives like the fediverse or digital public infrastructure (Zuckerman, 2020), but simply through the constant emergence of new, centralized, corporate or venture-backed platforms. Nostalgic anticipation provides a framework for understanding a social media landscape dominated by platform capitalism based on data extraction, that for all its “radical novelties may, in historical light, reveal themselves to be simple continuities” (Srnicek, 2016, p. 9). It idealizes social media’s past as an unproblematic and equalizing force for all, propelling it into a potential future where it is possible to reclaim those imagined characteristics. Nostalgic anticipation is a discursive framework that promotes anticipation of changes to the social media landscape—a landscape that could be celebratory, expressive, authentic, and connective (again)—while implying that these changes can be accomplished if users just endure the conditions that existing platforms impose—surveillance, bias, exploitation, and misinformation among them—until the “right” social media platform emerges.

By highlighting and deconstructing this discursive framework, we attempt to see through recuperative visions about social media platforms emerging after the past decade’s techlash, and create a foundation for a more clear-eyed view of how these platforms function in the social world. The vision of social media as a human life cycle emerging from these accounts—one currently experiencing a midlife crisis—does not ultimately serve a more clear-eyed view. Instead, this analysis points out that we must continue to bring a critical lens to narratives around social media, as the nostalgic anticipation of the current moment may only serve to further obfuscate and entrench existing platform politics.

Limitations and future directions

While this project contributes to theorizing the social dynamics and imaginaries of technological change, it also has limitations that should be addressed in future research. Our sample is limited by our focus on English-language newspapers within a specific database, resulting in articles from newspapers primarily based in the United States, United Kingdom, India, and China. More focused searching to compare emergence discourses in different countries could further support a global analysis, comparing diverse discourses and userbases. This is especially relevant because emergence in different countries can operate on conflicting timelines, in addition to their differing and cultural contexts. For example, as TikTok was beginning to grow in North America and Europe after Bytedance acquired Music.ly, India was already preparing to ban the platform.

This research also presents a foundation for further work studying platform emergence and theorizing broader platform lifecycles, particularly with alternate stakeholder perspectives and different platform configurations. Our analysis is focused on emerging centralized platforms, but as these platforms grew over the past several years, social media has continued to rapidly change with the rise of decentralized platform models and the fediverse. As decentralized platforms develop, it will be important to compare their discursive constructions with those of more traditional, centralized structures. In addition, studying the perspectives of social media users, particularly as they migrate to new platforms in the face of social media’s perceived volatility, offers an alternative perspective on social media change. Future research could also study the generational dynamics of journalists writing about technology and social media, which may inform these nostalgic frames (see also Bolin, 2015). Finally, this research also underscores the importance of continued attention to early social media platforms and examining how platform pasts inform the present.

Conclusion

We understand nostalgic anticipation, with its expectation of the future manifest in a yearning for platform pasts, as the root of what was previously identified as social media’s midlife crisis. Narratives of midlife crisis also revolve around the realization of aging, the anticipation of future death, and a desire to “live life to the fullest,” oftentimes by engaging in activities associated with a nostalgic youthfulness. Crisis at midlife is existential rather than driven by any external danger or destabilization. However, this framing raises questions—whose midlife crisis is actually at the heart of this narrative? Who does the narrative of midlife crisis benefit?

Is it the aging concept of social media that is in crisis, or is it individual platforms like Facebook and Twitter, which have undergone major rebrands over the past several years? Could it be a midlife crisis of former tech wunderkinds turned maligned billionaires, like Mark Zuckerberg, who has recently been undergoing a personal and political rebranding, or Elon Musk, who has made a publicly far-right political turn (Hern, 2024; Higgins, 2024)? In our analysis of popular press discourses, the source of social media’s midlife crisis could also be the aging millennial journalists who remember the internet’s early days as synonymous with their own youth.

Ultimately, the notion of midlife crisis is a social construct that exists to describe a very specific kind of experience. It is associated with middle aged, middle class and rich men who use their accumulated wealth to live out idealized masculine versions of youthfulness. The connection between nostalgic anticipation and midlife crisis suggests that the anticipation and nostalgia pervading social media discourses are also highly interconnected with considerations of identity. Midlife crisis describes how the realization of aging can lead people to search for meaning and reinvent themselves, rooted in their distinct positionalities and experiences of power and privilege. Narratives of emerging centralized platforms show the imagined direction of social media reinvention: a direction intimately tied to moving past the techlash, through visions of social media’s idealized egalitarian past.