@kyletut

Reading McLuhan, I think he would identify the move from a chronological feed to an algorithmic feed as the defining media shift of our time. Chronological feeds still followed print linearity, much like newspapers. Even when the content was fragmented or chaotic, experience remained ordered by time. What you saw had a before and an after, and meaning accumulated through sequence. Algorithmic feeds create an acoustic space that is no longer organized by time, but by resonance. What appears is not what happened next, but what responds best. Sequence gives way to relevance, and causality slowly dissolves into pattern recognition. The feed no longer unfolds as a narrative you follow. It behaves more like an environment that surrounds you and continuously adjusts to your reactions. Within this space, meaning is experienced simultaneously rather than sequentially. Content resurfaces without regard for origin or moment, stripped of the temporal context that once anchored it. Memory becomes less historical and more associative. You rarely remember when you encountered something, only that it feels familiar and therefore true. The result is not distraction, but the loss of time as an organizing principle. When experience is no longer ordered by before and after, accountability weakens, personal narratives begin to fragment, and institutions built on continuity start to feel incoherent. History stops behaving like history and starts behaving like myth. Everything remains present and unresolved. Algorithmic feeds make the resonance of a meme more important than reality itself, and that inversion is the source of the dissonance you feel every time the internet feels louder, stranger, and less grounded than the world it claims to represent.

0 reply

0 recast

1 reaction