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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?

Patrick Paul Garlinger
Thought Thinkers
Published in
8 min readNov 14, 2024

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Shards of glass scattering, as if a mirror had exploded
Shards of shattered glass — Photo by Ning Shi on Unsplash

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…

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Thought Thinkers
Thought Thinkers

Published in Thought Thinkers

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Patrick Paul Garlinger
Patrick Paul Garlinger

Written by Patrick Paul Garlinger

Latest Book: Endless Awakening: Time, Paradox, and the Path to Enlightenment. Former prof & lawyer, now mystic, writer, intuitive. buymeacoffee.com/iamppg

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