Re-Fragmentation

Once upon a time, America had three TV networks. It was a fluke of history that lasted maybe a few decades, from the mid-Fifties to the late Eighties and the rise of cable, but for that period of time, we had something very close to a national monoculture. Show up at work in the morning and everybody would have probably seen the same TV shows last night. Further, there were a handful of big national news magazines... monthlies or weeklies ...that everyone read, and blockbuster movies tended to linger a lot longer in theaters in those pre-cable and VHS days, ensuring that most everyone got a chance to see them.

The era of cable and DVDs and the dawn of the internet caused a certain amount of fragmentation, but some coherence came back with the dawn of the big social media sites.

Half everybody was on Facebook and/or Twitter. Increasingly, though, people are fleeing to smaller, also siloed, alternatives that are safe spaces for their particular politics; Web 2.0 versions of Web 1.0 titans like FreeRepublic and Democratic Underground. Even if you're still on the big sites, their algorithms are so finely honed that they can let you silo yourself as effectively as if you'd migrated.

"The internet destroyed any idea of a monoculture long ago, but new complications cloud the online ecosystem today: TikTok’s opaque “For You” recommendation system, the ascension of paywalls that limit access to websites such as this one, the collapse of Twitter—now X—under Elon Musk, the waning relevance of news across most social-media sites. The broad effect is an online experience that feels unique to every individual, depending on their ideologies and browsing habits. The very idea of popularity is up for debate: Is that trend really viral? Did everyone see that post, or is it just my little corner of the internet? More than before, it feels like we’re holding a fun-house mirror up to the internet and struggling to make sense of the distorted picture."

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