Is the Era of Social Media Ending?

June 15, 2026

Social Context

Everything you do in life is done within a certain frame of context; such as sitting at home alone, being out with your friends, or being professional at work. For each of these, your social behaviours will shift. The way you speak with your closest friends will be different than the way you speak with your manager.

This can manifest as shifting your vocal styling, speaking registers, the vocabulary you choose, and the types of information you volunteer or the secrets you keep. This is a natural skill all social animals have deep within them, and we shift between these contexts effortlessly and without thought.

This can make it seem like there is a certain “real you” in there somewhere, usually the context you are most comfortable with. Who you are at home, with your family, might be who you wish to be at the office. For others perhaps the inverse is true. But in reality, each one of these contexts is a different reflection of you, and each comprises your whole being.

In 1959, the sociologist Erving Goffman called this audience segregation 1. Goffman noted this isn’t just performative though; we do it to protect ourselves and to hedge risks. In fact, we rely on those audiences staying separate. You don’t want or expect that spicy gossip over brunch to make it to the headlines in tomorrow’s newspaper.

Social media broke these distinct contexts. We thought this would be a desirable technological improvement — we all wanted to be more out there, more public! It was exciting when the first social feeds started appearing on the internet. But the structural consequence of putting every single one of your audiences all in the same feed, and asking you to speak to them all at once, on the record, permanently, turned out to have consequences we didn’t foresee.

Phrased like that, it’s hard to imagine we ever thought this would end in a good place.

Context Collapse

The media scholar Joshua Meyrowitz first traced this elimination of context to broadcast technology. In No Sense of Place (1985), he argued that electronic media dissolves the walls between social situations that physical architecture used to keep apart 2. The anthropologist Michael Wesch similarly describes speaking into a webcam as speaking to “a virtually infinite number of possible others.” This invokes a sense of speaking to every imaginable audience — and therefore, no specific audience at all 3. Around the same time, danah boyd was documenting how teenagers online lived inside “collapsed contexts,” where parents, employers, classmates, and exes all coexisted on a single profile 4.

In 2011, Alice Marwick and danah boyd studied how Twitter users cope with context collapse. They found that because you cannot see who is actually reading your posts, you write for an imagined audience; your (assuredly incorrect) mental model of who is out there 5. Jenny Davis and Nathan Jurgenson later split the phenomenon into two failure modes: context collusion, where you deliberately mash audiences together (the post meant for “everyone”), and context collision, where audiences you never intended to meet collide by accident: such as the joke for your friends that your boss reads, or the vacation photo your insurer sees 6.

The consequences are consistently corrosive:

  • Self-censorship. When every audience is present, the only safe speech is bland speech. Users retreat to generic, inoffensive posts to avoid blindsiding an audience they cannot see 5.
  • Performance and self-commodification. The flip side of going quiet is going on stage. Posting to an imagined audience turns ordinary sharing into a managed exhibition, curated not for any real person but for the “lowest common denominator” of everyone who might conceivably see it 7. The behaviour it rewards is micro-celebrity: strategic self-branding, optimizing for reaction, and performing authenticity 5.
  • Imagined surveillance and anxiety. Posting to an unknowable crowd produces a low-grade, persistent sense of being watched, never quite sure who is on the other side of the screen 56.
  • Defensive labour. People split into multiple accounts, prune their history, and retreat to ephemeral formats. This is essentially reconstructing the context boundaries the platform removed in the first place 5.

The misery so often blamed on “social media” is often mis-attributed to algorithms or advertising. Those don’t help, but the problem is architectural. The medium requires context collapse to function as intended. Social media wouldn’t be social media without this context collapse, almost by definition.

Communication technology itself is not inherently broken. We should treat context collapse as a bug to be designed out rather than an inevitability. Give people back bounded rooms (smaller audiences, conversations that are momentary and intimate, a history that doesn’t trail you forever), and the foundational problem corrects itself. The goal should be rebuilding the walls that let people be healthily authentic across many contexts.

ESRB Similarities

In 1993, after public demonstrations of Mortal Kombat and Night Trap, Senators Joseph Lieberman and Herb Kohl convened hearings on violence in video games. In February 1994, Lieberman threatened to create a federal commission to rate and regulate games if the industry didn’t act 13. The industry, fragmented and nervous about state control, decided to self-organize: the Entertainment Software Rating Board was founded in 1994, and the voluntary rating system was enough to placate the Senate and defuse the immediate threat of a government regulator or an outright ban 14. Three decades later, the ESRB is still a self-regulatory body. The industry kept control by acting before it was forced to.

Social media tried to follow the same playbook, and it tried hard. Over the past decade the platforms poured enormous resources into staying ahead of the regulators: tens of thousands of content moderators, trust-and-safety teams, parental controls, screen-time dashboards, age-verification experiments, independent oversight boards, and one of the largest lobbying efforts in corporate history.

Unfortunately it didn’t work, but the reason why is interesting to contemplate. Games had a clean and simple fix: rate the content, put a label on the box, and the threat dissolved. Context collapse is much harder to deal with. It isn’t a property of any single piece of content you could flag or any setting you could toggle; it’s baked into the shape of the medium itself. You cannot moderate your way out of an architecture. The good-faith effort was a bandaid that could never succeed the way the ESRB did in previous decades.

Regulation

In December 2024 Australia passed the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act, barring under-16s from designated platforms (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, X, YouTube, Reddit, Twitch and others), with enforcement beginning December 2025 and penalties up to AUD $49.5 million 89. As of mid-2026, Australia is not alone 10:

  • United Kingdom: under-16s; announced June 2026, expected spring 2027 (Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, X; WhatsApp and Signal excluded; AI companion chatbots restricted to 18+).
  • Canada: under-16s; bill introduced June 2026, with a carve-out for platforms that can demonstrate youth-protection policies.
  • France: under-15s; passed the lower house in January 2026, awaiting the Senate.
  • Spain: under-16s; proposed February 2026, paired with a push to hold executives personally accountable for platform hate speech.
  • Denmark: under-15s; secured parliamentary support in November 2025, law expected mid-2026, with a state age-verification app.
  • Greece: under-15s; implementation slated for January 2027.
  • Turkey: under-15s; passed parliament April 2026, awaiting presidential assent.
  • Germany (under-16s), Austria (under-14s), Poland and Slovenia (under-15s): all have draft legislation in 2026.
  • Indonesia and Malaysia: under-16s; both announced restrictions for rollout in 2026.

A dozen-plus countries across four continents, in roughly eighteen months, are all reaching for the same instrument. Whatever you think of these laws, the political verdict is in. Social media as we know it is problematic enough to warrant federal controls.

What defines Social Media?

A problem shared across each of these pieces of legislation is we do not have a working definition of “social media.” The laws being drafted to ban it are broad-reaching and inconsistent.

In People v. Lopez (2016), a California court confronted a statute that defined “social media” as “an electronic service or account, or electronic content, including, but not limited to, videos or still photographs, blogs, video blogs, podcasts, instant and text messages, email, online services or accounts, or Internet Web site profiles or locations.” Read literally, that sweeps in your online banking, your email, essentially your entire internet presence 11. A social-media definition should be at once accurate, content-neutral, and precise enough to survive a vagueness challenge; we aren’t there yet 12.

Australia’s new law shows the same strain 8. Almost any modern app clears the definition, including multiplayer games, dating apps, fitness trackers, and even comment sections of news websites. Recognizing this, the Act hands the Communications Minister and the eSafety Commissioner the power to decide, by decree, which services are in and which are out 9. The statute can’t draw the line, so a regulator draws it case by case, app by app.

Vagueness in the definition becomes arbitrariness in the enforcement. We are now trying to outlaw problems without being able to name them. If we are not careful and clear in our execution, the “next big thing” of genuinely healthy and good internet communication could be swept under the same rug.

The end of social media

People are not going to stop wanting to talk to each other, and the underlying technology will mature into something genuinely desirable and healthy.

What’s fading is the phrase. “Social media” was a category defined by its worst design: the one-room, all-audiences, permanent-record machine that made context collapse the default state of your internet existence. The industry couldn’t reform it from the inside fast enough (not for lack of trying), and as a result the term “social media” is trending negatively. New products are quietly distancing themselves from the label, and parents trust it less every year. The phrase is falling out of favour.

The medium that solves the fundamental issues shouldn’t call itself social media, for the same reason nobody sells “horseless carriages” anymore. The technology that earns back our trust will arrive under a different name, one that describes who it’s for rather than the behaviour it accidentally produced. Call it Human Media: connection designed around bounded context, human pacing, and authenticity — instead of reach, permanence, and collapse.

The Telephone

This pattern is old. New communication technologies have always drawn a backlash, often tongue-in-cheek, before we learn to live with them. Ambrose Bierce defined the telephone as “an invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance” 15. Even Mark Twain — one of the first people in America to have a telephone installed in his home — ended an 1890 Christmas greeting by wishing everyone peace and bliss “except the inventor of the telephone” 16, barely fourteen years after Alexander Graham Bell patented the device.

The grievance was specific and it endured. Decades later, Smithsonian records an unnamed professor in 1929 voicing the same complaint: “Thanks to the telephone, motor-car and such-like inventions, our neighbors have it in their power to turn our leisure into a series of interruptions” 17.

Of course, the convenience of these inventions outweighed their costs — but as we learned their downsides, we designed them away. Most people silence their phones now, and answering one is far less of a command than it was a century ago.

Social media is feeling that same pushback today, and people are again demanding a design change.

Human Media

VanChat is Prosocial Design’s attempt to resolve the problem of context collapse, and it is the first app to label itself Human Media rather than social media.

Instead of one profile facing every audience you’ve ever had, VanChat gives you small, fun spaces to curate with your friends. It’s the feeling and rich feature set of a traditional social media platform, with a narrowed scope that fundamentally changes the premise. Messaging is asynchronous and private, which dissolves the imagined audience and the FOMO-driven compulsion to check; you are speaking to a known few, not performing for an unknowable everyone. The walls of division Goffman took for granted are put back in place.

It answers the trust failures that invited regulation, too. The app commits to data that is private, secure, and never monetized; it has no mandate to maximize engagement and scale; and it follows a Charter under which intolerance is not tolerated. Child safety is treated as a first principle rather than a compliance afterthought. These aren’t features bolted on to dodge a ban; they’re what “Human Media” means as a design brief.

The laws can’t say what social media is, so they reach for ministerial discretion. Human Media proposes the opposite: define the category by what it does to people, and build to the healthy side of that line on purpose. Be the thing that wouldn’t need to be legislated, because it was never built to collapse your contexts in the first place.

VanChat is a product we hope will be a template and foundation for the future, that can be referenced by lawmakers and businesses alike as an example of what healthy communication could look like. We look forward to other businesses proudly using the Human Media label.

Citations

Footnotes

Academic sources

  1. Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books. (Origin of “audience segregation.”) ↩

  2. Meyrowitz, J. (1985). No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. New York: Oxford University Press. ↩

  3. Wesch, M. (2009). “YouTube and You: Experiences of Self-Awareness in the Context Collapse of the Recording Webcam.” Explorations in Media Ecology, 8(2), 99–114. https://doi.org/10.1386/eme.8.2.99_1 (See also Wesch’s 2008 lecture, “An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube.”) ↩

  4. boyd, d. (2008). Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics. PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley. (On “collapsed contexts” in MySpace/Friendster.) ↩

  5. Marwick, A. E., & boyd, d. (2011). “I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience.” New Media & Society, 13(1), 114–133. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444810365313 ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  6. Davis, J. L., & Jurgenson, N. (2014). “Context collapse: theorizing context collusions and collisions.” Information, Communication & Society, 17(4), 476–485. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2014.888458 ↩ ↩2

  7. Hogan, B. (2010). “The Presentation of Self in the Age of Social Media: Distinguishing Performances and Exhibitions Online.” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, 30(6), 377–386. https://doi.org/10.1177/0270467610385893 (Source of the “lowest common denominator” audience and the performance/exhibition distinction.) ↩

  1. Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024 (Cth). Federal Register of Legislation. https://www.legislation.gov.au/C2024A00127/asmade/text; overview at Parliamentary Education Office. https://peo.gov.au/understand-our-parliament/history-of-parliament/history-milestones/australian-parliament-history-timeline/events/online-safety-amendment-social-media-minimum-age-act-2024 ↩ ↩2

  2. DLA Piper, “Australia’s Social Media ‘Ban’ and the eSafety Commissioner’s Social Media Minimum Age Regulatory Guidance,” Privacy Matters (Feb. 2026). https://privacymatters.dlapiper.com/2026/02/australias-social-media-ban-and-the-esafety-commissioners-social-media-minimum-age-regulatory-guidance/ ↩ ↩2

  3. “Here are the countries banning children from social media,” TechCrunch (June 15, 2026). https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/15/social-media-ban-children-countries-list/ ↩

  4. People v. Lopez, 2016 WL 297942 (Cal. App. Ct. Jan. 25, 2016). The quoted definition is from Cal. Educ. Code § 99120; the court ultimately declined to apply it and crafted its own. Discussed in E. Goldman, “What’s the Legal Definition of a ‘Social Media Site’? Uh… (People v. Lopez),” Technology & Marketing Law Blog (Jan. 2016). https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2016/01/whats-the-legal-definition-of-a-social-media-site-uh-people-v-lopez.htm ↩

  5. Wacker, M. (5 April 2024). “What Is Social Media?” City Journal. https://www.city-journal.org/article/what-is-social-media ↩

Historical sources

  1. “1993–94 United States Senate hearings on video games,” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993%E2%80%9394_United_States_Senate_hearings_on_video_games ↩

  2. “Entertainment Software Rating Board,” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entertainment_Software_Rating_Board ↩

  3. Bierce, A. (1911). The Devil’s Dictionary. New York: Neale Publishing. Entry: “TELEPHONE, n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.” ↩

  4. Twain, M. Christmas greeting, dated Hartford, Conn., 23 December 1890, published in the New York World. Full line: “…may eventually be gathered together in a heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss — except the inventor of the telephone.” Reproduced at TwainQuotes.com. http://www.twainquotes.com/Telephone.html ↩

  5. “Texting Isn’t the First New Technology Thought to Impair Social Skills,” Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/texting-isnt-first-new-technology-thought-impair-social-skills-180958091/ (Quoting a 1929 critic on the telephone and motor-car turning leisure into “a series of interruptions.”) ↩

Further reading