“We started talking about vibes in September 2020,” says Dr Antonia Ward, chief futurist at trends intelligence company Stylus. “We were looking at how social media was reflecting a more chaotic mood. Before that, platforms such as Instagram had been quite buttoned down and filtered, but something shifted. We began sending a more impressionistic... See more

The first is more social than media. It’s driven by a backlash to performative, status-seeking social media: people want to spend quality time online with close friends and family. This means less Facebook and Instagram and more WhatsApp and Messenger.