Contagion: The chaos of the digital ether

The utopian ideals of social media were perhaps always naively optimistic, but they have never looked more dead. Sharing, collaboration, user-generated content, folksonomies and digitally mediated communities were meant to drive a renaissance of liberal humanist values, providing a new socially-constructed foundation for truth and value to supplant the political grand narratives of the twentieth century (cf Lessig, 1999; O’Reilly, 2010). Instead our technologically mediated culture has fallen into a slough of digital despond where truth has been devalued and meaning diluted. Misinformation and disinformation proliferate at an alarming rate, with individual and state actors alike harnessing the power of social media to disrupt the public sphere (Tredinnick, 2023). Everyday social media services have become sites of largely unchallenged political extremism. Bots recirculate content and drive engagement at the expense of significance and meaning. What is emerging is a kind of chaos of the digital ether, where clashing and conflicting signals undermine social media as a useful medium, and threated the integrity of political and social institutions. Amid the chaos something fundamentally useful has been lost.