For two decades, “social media” has been the master lens through which we have understood digital communication – defined by user-generated content, networked publics, and participatory culture. Yet that era is coming to an end. Legacy platforms are declining as users abandon polarized, commercialized spaces for private chats and closed networks, while algorithmic short-form video increasingly displaces social networks. Generative AI accelerates this transition, filling feeds with synthetic interaction and “AI slop”. Public platforms are thus evolving into a new kind of broadcast media – dominated by machine-generated material, engineered with algorithmic precision for maximal attention extraction. We appear, in short, to be entering the post-social era of platforms. As our inherited concepts and methods no longer fit this emerging landscape, we face the question: how do we study digital media after social media? This talk outlines a research agenda for post-social media studies: a call to develop new concepts, methods, and critical vocabularies for a media environment where publics are algorithmically assembled, communication becomes synthetic, and the attention economy no longer depends on human participation.

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