Social media constitutes a contextual monoculture that destroys meaning-bearing spatial context

Evidence

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

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘contextual monoculture’ imagery parallels the reader’s earlier note that lo-fi soundscapes erase signal-noise distinction. — connects to: Social media’s fragmentation and boundary-dissolution combine to undermine the national public sphere’s integrating power — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 35; Social media may be changing citizens’ perception of the public sphere itself — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 43; Shifts in spatial and temporal representation drive shifts in social relations — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1584 (+9 more)
• SEED: An essay contrasting architectural and ecological metaphors for social media — rooms/walls vs. monoculture/biodiversity — could extend Odell’s bioregional framing to platform design.