New media and social sustainability

Under which social conditions can media practices be considered sustainable in the long term, when so-called new media are no longer understood primarily as technological innovations, but as stabilized social infrastructures that structure behavior, attention, and social relations?

The sustainability of media practices is not determined by their technical novelty, but by

• whether they enable social participation without systematically producing overload, exclusion, or dependency,
• whether they foster collective capacities rather than shifting responsibility solely onto individual digital literacy, and
• whether their use remains socially, temporally, and psychologically viable, instead of depleting shared social resources.

The core question therefore becomes: How must media practices, interfaces, and governance structures be designed so that they do not merely presuppose social sustainability, but actively generate it?