Royal spectacle was a unifying gaze. It was the mainstream media of its day, a shared social platform to give…

Royal spectacle was a unifying gaze. It was the mainstream media of its day, a shared social platform to give broader meaning to society. Watching these mourners and their phones we see what’s replaced it. A fracturing. Short thread. /1 https://t.co/fLO3Hd1z57

With their phones these mourners are converting a collective spectacle into a million different private universes of meaning. The pics will irrigate their preferred social media feeds, providing whatever meanings they and their chosen communities apply to them. /2 https://t.co/DwK9XBoAxg

You’ll see that in every social activity now, even basic tourism. The ‘sights’ transformed into selfies and other pics, to weave into millions of personal narratives. We transform all of our old collective spaces into raw material for these disparate universes of meaning. /3 https://t.co/BLNbTO5RtW

You can see and feel it, the absence of attention to or feeling for the place itself, what’s important is how it will be used to curate an ongoing virtual world of meaning. You could celebrate this as some great explosion of diversity and plurality. /4

I don’t think it’s as benign as that, as much as social media companies might market it in that way. What the exponential growth of social media did was capitalise on the progressive atomisation of society by neoliberal politics. Millions of brutally isolated market…/5

…consumers now had a way to try to re-build some sense of collective space. The rest is history, and is still in the making. We’re in pre-monotheism days again, society is now a fractured pluriverse of personal gods. Competing collective adolescent groupings, tribes. /6

Want to know why we can’t do a basic thing, like try to stop a pandemic? Because there is no ‘we’ now. There are thousands of we’s. We’re more likely to use public health protections as opportunities for selfies, to weaponise our private universes of grievance. /7 https://t.co/gDDxguEO2U

The most unasked question in social science is also the only one that really matters right now. What does ‘we’ mean? The old societies we’re replacing knew, but they’re being pulverised by phones and social media platforms. Who knows what might emerge from it all. /end