The lifecycle of platform-mediated urban desirability: Digital nomadism and the temporal politics of visibility

Source abstract

Through comparative content analysis of 600 high-engagement social media posts (2021–2024) across Rio de Janeiro, Barcelona and Chiang Mai, this article develops a lifecycle framework for understanding how cities move through platform-mediated attention economies. Three representational stages are identified, namely speculative emergence, infrastructural saturation and platform obsolescence, through which digital nomad urbanism operates primarily through aestheticisation. This aesthetic work may precede and participate in conditioning material transformation, whilst its representational traces can persist after algorithmic attention recedes. Cities enter representational obsolescence when their narratives cease generating algorithmic momentum, a process that reveals digital nomadism as extractive visibility: appropriating urban difference for affective circulation whilst obscuring its consequences for long-term and less-mobile residents. The analysis extends postcolonial critique to account for temporal extraction, showing how digital colonialism operates through cycles of discovery, commodification and abandonment that intensify existing global inequalities.