Roselinde Bon - The Urban (After)Life of the Social Media Hype [Hype Studies Conference 2025 presentation]
Abstract
The effects of overtourism in popular European cities like Barcelona, Venice, and Amsterdam have become visible through congested streets, public protests, and municipal restrictions. While this is not a new phenomenon, it has evolved with the rise of social media. Platforms like TikTok and Instagram generate online waves of uneven visibility that not only reflect the city, but increasingly choreograph how the city is navigated. I investigate how social media trends become a spatial force: circulating as online imaginaries while also materializing as hyped locations in the city. I propose the concept of the urban feedback loop to describe the cyclical process by which digital trends shape spatial practices, and how those practices by social media users reinforce the production of content and media narratives. Through this lens, I map urban hype ecologies: dynamic systems of visibility and movement in which algorithmicallycurated imaginaries determine how specific spaces in the city are amplified and aestheticized. My analysis draws from an ongoing PhD project based in Amsterdam, combining online trend analysis with on-site observations and interviews. This mixed-methods approach traces how social media trends translate into an urban geography of hype; a geography shaped less by traditional urban planning than by platform logic and aesthetic replicability. By situating Amsterdam within a broader European context, the project examines how online trends do not only reflect the cityscape, but actively reshape it. In doing so, it offers a framework for understanding social media-driven hypes as an emerging urban logic.