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POLITICS
Social Media Has Shattered America
Can we put the pieces back together or will we doom-scroll as democracy dies?
Fragmentation, Social Media, and Smart Phones
The internet is not infinite, but sometimes it feels like it is. As Ben Ulansey writes: “There’s more on any app than a million fingers can scroll. There are enough reels and TikToks and YouTubes to waste entire lifetimes.”
The overload of information means you have to pick and choose among platforms and voices. You are forced to ignore most of it. You can’t even keep up with the ones you do follow. Our human limitations demand that we be selective — some hang out on BlueSky and Instagram, others cruise TikTok and YouTube.
Our lives today are carried out in digital silos. We’re consuming what the platforms decide to share with us. We occupy algorithmically curated digital worlds. Sometimes we overlap and bump into each other, but most often we’re oscillating in isolation.
Scrolling our lives away on smartphones has deleterious effects on our brains. It primes us for bursts of dopamine-bound pleasure and ignites a thirst for outrage. Our attention spans shrink. Screens and scrolling nullify our sleep, trigger states of fight or flight, and…