The Loop of Loops: The Recursive Dynamics of Videos on Social Media

After the global, outstanding success of the Chinese-owned TikTok in 2020, most social media platforms have adopted the short video format as their preferred way of engaging users and generat- ing content, such as Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and Facebook Watch. These videos are typically proposed to the user in dedicated sections of the platform, in the form of an endless flow of videos, categorised and distributed according to algorithmically calculated user preferences. The emergence of short videos marks a significant novelty compared to previously phases in social media led by image or textual content. Indeed, the new peculiar functioning of Tik Tok, based on memetic forms of imitation and replication rapidly adopted by other platforms, has been compared to the ‘end of the social networks’ as we knew them from the beginning of their story (The Economist, 2024). This brief piece critically discusses the algorithmically prompted recursive mechanism that underpins the ways in which social media platforms distribute visual content, and specifically short videos, to users. We conceptualise this dynamics as a ‘loop of loops’, where the first order of loops is constituted by the self-repeating cycle of each video, embedded in the non-stop flux of (apparently) new content that is continuously proposed to the user in a platform, and the second order of loops is represented by the connection among the various platform-specific feedback loops created among social media platforms through processes of content iteration, translation or reappropriation (Beer, 2019; Loosen et al., 2016). We illustrate this mechanism with vignettes taken from two platforms, TikTok and IG (reels), highlighting some of its issues. Challenging the mainstream metaphor of the ‘stream’, employed by predominant technological imaginaries ever since the launch and diffusion of Web 2.0, we argue that the ‘loop of loops’ looks more like a clogged pool, where the movement, only apparent, takes the form of an eternal return of the same contents, actors and themes. As such, the ‘loop of loops’, despite constituting the infrastructural mechanism governing current social media functioning, is already displaying failures, discontent and practices of resistance, cracking open possible ways out from it.