The ‘loop of loops’. The Recursive Dynamics of Videos on Social Media

Abstract

Most social media platforms – including TikTok, Instagram and Facebook – have adopted video formats as their preferred way of engaging users and generating content. This contribution argues that not only social media video platforms create algorithmically determined feedback loops, but that these platforms conversely form a ‘loop of loops’. Each platformised loop connects to the others through processes of translation and transformation, where the infrastructural logic and the aesthetic grammar of the platform combines with the one of the video loops. The emergence of a ‘loop of loops’ breaks with the previous text- or image-centred approach to social media content. In order to understand its appearance and functioning, the ‘loop of loops’ must be contextualised in what Kornbluh (2024) has defined the style of Too Late Capitalism, that is immediacy. From this, it derives that the ‘loop of loops’ requires a constant overflow of media and production, which is functional to the compulsive, quick-paced, potentially infinite and extenuating doom scrolling. The contribution then concludes by reflecting on the frictions and leaking which enable micro-forms of resistance against the loop of loops.