Social media influence materialises in the physical world by shaping our urban environment and changing the modality we experience. This under-explored outcome still lacks the conceptual tools to build a discourse around it. We present a case study that showcases how urban planning and development are influenced by social media and a first framework addressing the interrelation between social media, urban design, and the experience of the urban environment. This short contribution provides concepts for critically analysing the physical implications of social media-based ubiquitous hypertext systems.

CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Hypertext / hypermedia ; • Networks → Social media networks ; • Human-centered computing~Smartphones;

Social Media , Smart Cities , Hypertext Paradigm

ACM Reference Format: Iman Naja, Miguel Valdez, and Alessio Antonini. 2024. Social Media and Cities: a case-study based analysis of how digital life influences the urban physical environment. In 35th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT '24), September 10--13, 2024, Poznan, Poland. ACM, New York, NY, USA 7 Pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3648188.3675144

Social media bring forward deep social implications, so much so that it is hard to argue against. Indeed, clear examples of social media affecting cities are in the news. In the UK, online groups coordinated the hijacking of the CCTV system of the London Ultra-Low Emission Zone by physically removing cameras from the streets. Similarly, anti-colonial movements took charge of the systematic removal of historical, if controversial, monuments and statues. These events seem to be disconnected, yet, as we will argue, they are just the most visible (and possibly violent) expressions of a structural connection between social media and the urban environment. Thus, some of the implications of social media materialise in the physical world by shaping our urban environment and changing the modality we experience. This is a less expected outcome of social media that is worth addressing in order to develop the necessary conceptual tools to build a discourse around these phenomena. This contribution presents a case study that showcases how planning and urban development are not only influenced by social media but may also be for its benefit, and how social media has become a novel angle from which to read about the city with its merit.

From hypertext lenses, social media reifies social interrelations, making our tension or will toward them tangible. The will and effort to relate with others becomes the central digital artefact that is used to augment conversations, narratives, and activities. These now materialised social statements are the source of the social implications that we do not only expect but which have become the core of the social media value proposition. Reconnecting with old friends against the barriers of time, space and a life apart, or electing our community in opposition to what our close reality offers, such as work colleagues, neighbours or relatives. The possibilities offered by social media entail a specific hierarchy that places these social statements above material constraints, which is the source of the less expected physical implications we discuss in this paper.

Social media change the way we experience the urban environment [6]. These impactful changes are investigated in this paper through a case study showcasing how social media is one of the root causes behind the drive for innovation of services and technology, especially in highly economically and technologically cities in the Global North. The case study thus becomes an entry point for developing a framework for the interrelation between social media, technology, planning, and our collective experience of the urban environment. The framework is intended to support the Hypertext community in designing and analysing social media and ubiquitous hypertext systems like interactive maps and site-specific installations.

Through social media, the use of hypertext as a method of inquiry, knowledge representation and social fabric has now escaped the lab and the computer room, becoming adopted by the public at large. Hypertextual inquiry thus becomes a distributed endeavour with emergent taxonomies and rules that escape centralised control and predefined boundaries  [35]. Social media therefore introduces productive tensions into emergent forms of urban life which increasingly rely on structured, interconnected and complex information systems, with social media acting as an increasingly widespread interface through which humans make use of those systems. Importantly, the real-timeness and data richness of such systems have now become crucial tools for thinking about, relating to and navigating a complex world. Such hypertexts are expected to be almost literally omnipresent and always accessible, to the point that their absence is perceived as an interruption to the practices of everyday life. It is well established in the literature that social media is already used as a platform to influence or direct the development and planning of urban spaces and that data from social media is being used for urban analysis and modelling. However, in this contribution, we show that urban planning and development now also cater to social media, and thus, we argue that the materiality of the city is now in a mutually constitutive relation with the demands of social media.

We also discuss hypertextual social media practices in terms of the materialities (e.g., infrastructures), skills and meanings through which urban life, urban form and hypertext now continuously reshape each other in a feedback loop powered by the attention economy. As we do so, we attend to the urban rather than the global- we attend, for example, to the physical footprint of the networking infrastructures needed to make social media available in specific sites, but we do not investigate the carbon footprint of the remote data centres used to store, process and distribute the massive volume of data produced by it. Impacts on climate change and the environment are therefore out of the scope of this paper.

The rest of the contribution is structured as follows. Section two provides a brief background on the relationship between social media, technology and cities. Following, we provide an analysis of the case study and a conceptual framework for the analysis of this phenomenon. Lastly, the concluding section addresses the scope of the intertwined relationship between social media and cities.

Technology has been broadly defined as “a configuration that works” [30]. This definition usefully expands the scope of technological analysis, which must go well beyond artefacts and devices in themselves to attend to the networks of sociotechnical relationships that make it possible for technology to work. We therefore investigate social media not as a set of devices and standards, but as a sociotechnical network in which humans, institutions, cities, and (narrowly defined) technologies such as social media applications, mobile handsets and 5G towers are all inextricably entangled in a seamless sociotechnical network.

Although we study social media as a seamless network, seams and dichotomies must be introduced for analytical purposes as we attend to specific interactions within the network. In this section we consider the relationships between cities and technology, the role of social media as a driver of technological advancement, and the impactful mechanisms through which social media shapes urban spaces and our experiences of them. At the time of writing this manuscript, there are no studies about the physical footprint of catering for social media when planning the urban environment, i.e., the benefits that urban planning and development has on social media. We, therefore, consider works related to the other relationships - namely how technology and urban planning benefit from and influence each other, how technology and social media benefit from and influence each other, how social media influences urban planning. We also provide predictions about social media and cities to outline their overlap in the future.

2.1 City & Technology

2.2 Social Media & Technology

2.3 Social Media and the Experience of Cities

2.4 The Current Status Quo and the Near Future

The Advanced Radio in Milton Keynes (MarK5G) project aims to support innovative 5G services by improving network performance in high-density areas, e.g., the football stadium or shopping malls, and enabling the safe deployment of autonomous vehicles. Thus, MarK5G aims to leverage the capabilities of cutting-edge 5G technology to forge a seamlessly connected environment that potentially extends throughout the UK city of Milton Keynes and improves the experiences of high numbers of visitors and local residents while reducing costs, disruptions, and environmental impact. Within the context of the project and to gather user and service requirements, we were charged with creating scenarios and extracting user and service requirements.

3.1 Methodology

3.2 Scenario and Use Cases

The case study focuses mostly on how social media influences physical city infrastructures by deploying 5G masts and related reconfiguration and developing new services based on this new capability. As an attempt to generalise the lessons learned from this specific use case, the following analysis attends to the urban-shaping potential of the knowledge circulated through it and the collective actions that arise from such knowledge. For instance, social media has a role in the resistance of so-called “blade runners” as they destroy cameras to sabotage the Ultra-Low Emission Zone in London, and similar movements circulate information and misinformation to oppose the 15-minute city concept. Here, the interaction of hypertext and cities escapes the confines of government and planning as decisions about the future of cities are not defined by one actor in rational or analytical terms. Rather, social media becomes embedded in governance, here defined as collective action for public purposes and a recognition of the impactful overlaps of the spheres of the state, the economy and daily life [15]. Spatial imagination, the ability to make urban spaces meaningful and knowable, has long been acknowledged as central to planning and spatial strategy making [15]. Social media has been revealed as an impactful technology, structure, and set of practices that impact space and spatial imagination.

Our analysis builds on research applying practice theory as a lens to develop an infrastructural perspective on social media, which has been applied to disentangle the complex intersection of infrastructural materialities, data, content, and collective practices [17]. We, therefore, investigate the recursive relationship between human activities and structures in terms of practices conceptualised as patterns and as repeated performances of patterns, where each enactment reproduces the interdependences of which practice is comprised. Such interdependencies are, in turn, studied in terms of three elements necessary for any given practice to be enacted, namely materials, meaning and competencies, defined as follows [32]:

materials - including things, technologies, tangible physical entities and the stuff of which objects are made.

competencies - which encompasses skills, know-how and techniques. and

meanings - in which we include symbolic meanings, ideas and aspirations.

Importantly, we also identify how the elements of social media practices rely on different enabling elements at different scales ranging from the individual to the group and, ultimately, the community. For instance, we can usefully interrogate the required materialities in terms of the 5G handhelds (materialities available to the individual) or in terms of 5G micro-cells deployed in a stadium or shopping centre (materialities available to a group). Likewise, those same 5G micro-cells may be studied in terms of the technical know-how required for their installation and management (competencies available to a group) or in terms of the policy know-how required to regulate their installation and govern their harmonious and fair use (competences available to the community). Meanings, ideas and aspirations are also markedly different between levels, from the subjective meanings individuals may assign to being always connected to friends or followers and to the para-social connections to influencers, to the aspiration of companies in the attention economy, the ideals of innovation and convenience of the stadium owners in the scenario depicted, and with communities whose visions of urban future may be nebulous but clearly resist deployments of 5G masts.

4.1 Structure

4.2 Practice

Like other forms of hypertext, social media has been seen as a system to augment human capabilities, thinking about the world and relating to it. The use case reveals that people who care for urban spaces and plan for their future must now account for social media practices built on expectations of real-time and near-omnipresent connectivity. Social media has become a necessary interface to reality, a hypertext that provides access to information, relations, and shared emotions or effects through which urban environments and global networks become readable and immediate. Hypertext skills needed to enable social media practices are now commonplace and intuitive; meaningful imaginaries of always-connected futures are now seen as desirable and are fueled by the demands of the attention economy. Consequently, hypertext has long since escaped the confines of the computer room or the mobile screen. Social media is now taking over increasingly datafied urban spaces, their materialities begin to be reshaped to support the practices. In turn, digitally-mediated practices and attention economies drive resources into technological developments and infrastructural deployments. One concern identified in the scenarios is that the demand for social media as a rich hyper-text for humans will be in direct competition with the data demands of smart and autonomous systems. One risk is that the demands will not be met, and practices will be interrupted. Another is that infrastructures such as antennas will become so prevalent that they will negatively impact urban spaces. Several technologies have been considered to address those issues (e.g., micro-cells that make antennas invisible or shared infrastructures that reduce infrastructures’ material footprint while still meeting bandwidth demands). However, such technologies are outside of the scope of this discussion. What is relevant is that cities are now read through hypertexts, and practices increasingly assume constant and ubiquitous access to such digital interfaces to complex urban flows and place-based collective moods. As this urban hypertextuality becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, we suggest that attention to the materialities, meanings and skills that comprise the practices of urban hypertext provide a useful framework for analysis, anticipation and potential intervention.

Through this contribution, we highlighted less-investigated questions about social media effects:

What is the footprint of social media on cities and physical environments more generally?

Are the needs driving the development of next-generation networking infrastructures and technologies mostly driven by social media?

Is innovation now linked to, being seen, and given value via the lens of social media?

While informative, the Stadium MK case study presents limitations about how definitive our account of those questions can be, as we considered them from the viewpoint of an economically and technologically advanced city in the Global North. However, we believe the case study does present some general characteristics concerning the interrelationship between experiential expectations and urban development priorities. Indeed, a clear self-reinforcing loop binds together social media and networking infrastructures. Social media developers adapt to evolving networking capabilities by developing data-hungry latency-sensitive applications so that social media is not so defined by the medium - a 280-character post or a 6-second video clip - but by a seamless interaction with the world. The data-hunger and latency-sensitivity of social media are incentives for demand-driven deployments of more pervasive and capable data infrastructures, to the point that social media requirements inform today's infrastructures. Looking to 5G, the cost of deployment across the EU is estimated to reach €400 billion [24].

The last point we would like to make concerns why this matters and how the insights we hopefully provided can be put to good use. In the early days of web maps, a shocking analysis flagged that these digital twins represented the environment as “deserts” between points of interest (restaurants etc). This harsh comment was spot on about how the digitally mediated perception of places would potentially alter our understanding of the physical world we inhabit. Similarly, on a completely different topic, a wide range of post-Brexit vote enquiries highlighted how social media influenced the vote of rural UK about Turkish invasions despite the lack of any physical evidence. More than before, the case we highlighted shows how expectations built online become predominant in physical matters, a potential risk of disconnection between more ground truths and needs, and the direction of innovation and investments of collective resources. It is worth highlighting that while the Web can accommodate a plurality of options, the material environment does not in terms of resources allocated and the physical space that e.g. infrastructures occupy. Thus, what is the potential role or contribution of the hypertext community? On the one hand, we should incorporate this dimension of analysis while designing hypertext systems (just in case) and, through the study of emerging practices, look into the potential disconnects that emerge. Social media have a specific disruptive effect of being overridden by sheer volume (of information and hoarding users’ attention), the lived experience, and creating new risks connected to the combination of geolocation data and real-time public dissemination. However, the biggest and least understood challenge concerns the reformulation of priorities: what we do and the value of the physical space. Do we socialise to create opportunities to live and experience together, or do we use the physical environment to support our digital life? Is the online plurality of views reintegrated by coexisting in the same space, or is our common space being deconstructed and fragmented online? These questions, among others, should find their way to the centre of the hypertext agenda for the next years.

This research was partially supported by the UK Regional Innovation Fund (RIF) through a grant funding to the MarK (Advanced Radio in Milton Keynes) project.

⁎Corresponding author.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

HT '24, September 10–13, 2024, Poznan, Poland

© 2024 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).

ACM ISBN 979-8-4007-0595-3/24/09.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3648188.3675144