How Long Does the Excitement Last?

The Slow Unravelling of Social Media and the Return to Real Space

For twenty years, social media has been treated as an inevitability — a permanent layer of reality that would keep expanding, intensifying, and absorbing more of human life. But systems don’t grow forever. They cycle, they peak, they fragment, and eventually they reveal the limits that were always there.

The excitement around social media is not disappearing overnight. It is evaporating, slowly and unevenly, the way a boom town cools once the gold dust thins. The platforms remain, but the cultural energy that sustained them is draining away.

Why?

Because the network has shifted from novelty to noise, from connection to consumption, from community to performance. And as the system becomes heavier and more extractive, people begin to notice the asymmetry: the more they participate, the less they actually gain.

Phase I — Liberation

The early internet felt like open terrain. People used social platforms to escape geography, build new identities, and expand their social imagination. Online life was porous and experimental.
For many, this was the first time a “public” belonged to them.

Phase II — Infrastructure

Then the network solidified. Social media became essential infrastructure for culture, news, politics, and even self-worth.
What was fluid became structural.
What was personal became quantifiable.

Cities adapted too. Public spaces began to function as “content stages,” designed not only for use, but for visibility. The camera became an urban instrument.

Phase III — Extraction

As platforms centralized, the incentives changed.
Attention became the raw material; behavior, the product.
What once rewarded creativity now rewarded predictability.

This is when exhaustion began to appear — slowly at first, then suddenly. A system designed for infinite growth eventually encountered finite human bandwidth.

Phase IV — Decay

Today, the excitement feels thin. Younger generations scroll out of habit, not enthusiasm. Platforms cannibalize themselves, copying each other’s features in a closed loop.
The algorithm fills the gaps with recycled content because the cultural engine underneath is cooling.

This is not collapse; it is entropy.

Social media is becoming a background utility — still powerful, but no longer culturally magnetic.

What Comes Next

The decline of excitement does not mean a return to the past. It signals a shift in where human meaning is generated.

Three trajectories are emerging:

1. Micro-networks – Small, semi-private digital communities replacing the megascale feed.

2. Local physicality – Real-world spaces regaining cultural importance because they offer what platforms cannot: presence, tactility, unpredictability.

3. Civic digitality – Cities experimenting with digital tools not for entertainment, but for coordination, resilience, and collective intelligence.

The central story is not the death of social media. It is the rebalancing between digital and spatial life.

The Urban Implication

Cities will absorb the consequences. As algorithmic space loses its grip on cultural energy, physical space becomes meaningful again.
Not nostalgic, not analog — but anchored.

Urbanism reclaims an old truth: humans are not abstractions moving through data streams. They are embodied beings who need friction, contrast, and the sense of being somewhere.

The question “How long will the excitement last?” reveals a deeper transition.

It lasts until people realise the system no longer amplifies them — it diminishes them.

And when that moment arrives, the future of urban life shifts back toward what it has always been: a collective organism that grows through contact, not spectacle.