Digital proliferation collapsed the primary-secondary definer boundary

Evidence

In Europe, the bourgeois public sphere in its literary and its political form was only gradually able to free itself from the shadow of older formations – above all the religious public sphere of ecclesiastical government and the representative public sphere of the personal rule embodied in emperors, kings and princes – once the social-structural prerequisites for a functional separation of state and society, of the public from the private economic sphere, had been satisfied. … As we shall see, the digitalization of public communication is blurring the perception of this boundary between the private and public spheres of life, although the social-structural prerequisites for this distinction, which also has far-reaching implications for the legal system, have not changed. From the perspective of the semi-private, semi-public spaces of communication in which users of social media are active today, the inclusive character of the public sphere, which was hitherto clearly separate from the private sphere, is disappearing. … This constitutes, as I would now like to show, a disturbing development on the subjective side of media users that at the same time draws attention to the inadequacy of the political regulation of those new media. — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 22 (#expands, via linked claim)

The surprise homecoming party is an example of the useful architectural metaphor that Meyrowitz employs in No Sense of Place: it’s as if all of the walls around different social environments have come down. Unfortunately, those rooms and walls were precisely what provided the spatial context for what was said in them, since they summoned a distinct audience out of the anonymous masses by only letting some people in. In turn, that audience was able to make sense of each utterance by encountering it in the space where the sentiment grew, continuous with or adjacent to other related utterances. If we imagine a collection of these “rooms” as an ecology of contexts, it’s hard not to see social media as a contextual monoculture. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 548 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Primary definers frame problems, limiting all subsequent discussion.; Digital media blur the private-public boundary even though its structural basis persists — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 22; Social media constitutes a contextual monoculture that destroys meaning-bearing spatial context — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 548 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Digital media blur the private-public boundary even though its structural basis persists #expands (0.90) — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 22
• Social media constitutes a contextual monoculture that destroys meaning-bearing spatial context #expands (0.85) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 548
• The stuttering GIF defines twenty-first century digital temporality against Nineties smooth loops #exemplifies (0.75) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1332
• Digital-native generations experience time as disconnected micro-slices #exemplifies (0.72) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 53