The Information Landscape’s Fracturing Is On Full Display
Online conversations about the Israel-Hamas war show how fractured our information streams have become
It felt, as I flipped through the apps on my phone last Wednesday, like my mind was flipping through a series of parallel realities—the general topics across all of them seemed to line up but the conversations were wholly different.
On various news apps: “Here’s what we know about the hospital explosion in Gaza.”
On Instagram: outrage that Israel had struck a hospital in Gaza.
On Blue Sky: foreign policy analysis of the competing reports about the hospital explosion.
On Threads, Meta’s Twitter competitor: reports and analysis about Biden visiting Israel (and notably not visiting Jordan because of the hospital explosion).
On X, the decaying zombie platform formally known as Twitter:—actually, more on X later.
Somehow, the signal that cut through the noise—the reminder that all of these parallel realities, in fact, exist in the same shared timeline—was a concert movie. The clips, commentary, and criticism on every platform regarding Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour movie were all remarkably similar.
Much has been written and said about the death of the monoculture in recent years—the theory being that the internet has fractured culture into a series of subcultures and congregations that can each flourish in their own unique bubbles without ever needing to interact.
Now, a series of cultural phenomenons this year—the Eras Tour being one of them, alongside Barbenheimer, Beyonce’s Renaissance Tour, and Bad Bunny—appear to have attracted attention and affection from so many that some are wondering if reports of the monoculture’s death have been greatly exaggerated, or if it ever died in the first place.
I’m not here to settle that debate. Honestly, whether or not the monoculture is back or ever existed or never died seems to depend purely on how you define it.
What is clear is that even if there never was a monoculture, there was, at one point in time, a shared reality. The people who went mad for the Beatles and the people who were too cool for the Beatles at least, for the most part, shared the same handful of sources of information. Their perspectives on what was going on in the world may have been different, but they were at least basing those viewpoints on the same set of assumptions about what was happening in the world.
This past week has highlighted that, even if the internet, and specifically social media, has not fractured culture the way many predicted (at least so far), it has clearly fractured our streams of information.
The trend has, in part, been true for a while. The algorithms that many social media platforms, news aggregators, and even Google use to fine tune content to your taste can easily create bubbles—the topics, viewpoints, and perspectives you’ll see on any given platform don’t vary that much. For many years, this was considered the echo chamber problem—opinions are never challenged if each person’s feed keeps confirming the opinions they already have.
And yet, even as algorithms may have created these bubbles, there were still relatively few information sources—between a handful of social media platforms and mainstream media—with any notable usage. Society’s ideological bubbles may have become more pronounced and polarized but they still bled together, forming into one big gradient.
What has happened in the past year or so has been a more intense fracturing. The slow decay of Twitter, now X, since Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform last year has led a series of copycats and competitors to try and fill the void.
There’s Blue Sky, and Threads, and Mastodon, and Substack Notes, and…probably some others. None have come close to the heights of peak Twitter—which, admittedly, was always more widely relevant than it was widely used—and it’s not clear that any will.
Each has also taken a different approach to their algorithms and their user bases. X seems to be going to war with the media while Threads’ executives said they don’t plan on prioritizing the news while Blue Sky put out a special guide for journalists while Substack Notes is pushing whatever they seem to think “independent” journalism is. Each has a different policy toward misinformation. Each has a different understanding of free speech. Each views its societal responsibilities differently.
Add on to algorithmic echo chambers and this great shattering of the Twitter-sphere other existing problems in social media—namely, the spread of misinformation, particularly on the right—and what you end up with is a whole slew of small, increasingly distinct streams of information on which people are building their understandings of the world.
This big picture issue was probably true for a while, but it is now on full display amid the Israel-Hamas war, with the response to the explosion at al-Ahli Hospital highlighting the problem.
This past Tuesday evening, a number of major news organizations reported that an Israeli airstrike had killed more than 500 people at the hospital, before backtracking soon after when it became clear that the origin of the explosion could not be verified, and then backtracking further the next day when it was reported that the number of people killed may have been fewer than 500.
On Wednesday, the differences between the conversations happening across these various platforms were striking, even just among my own feeds, which should theoretically all be tailored to same person (me). My Instagram was populated with infographics and commentary seemingly unaware that the backtracking ever occurred, while on Blue Sky analysts assumed the backtracking was well known. Threads users seemed to have already moved on. I didn’t even get a chance to see what was going on on TikTok, let alone other platforms like Reddit and YouTube.
Essentially, the conflict so far has seen an incredibly rapid surge of information—and, to be sure, misinformation—unleashed online, leading users to feel that they must rapidly reach conclusions, which are confirmed and compounded by the conclusions of others in their respective bubbles.
Put simply, that had been echo chambers for opinions seem to have now become echo chambers for truths—an issue that we have seen on the right for years but that the left seemed to think it was immune to. Clearly, it was not.
These varying conclusions mean that when we do try and talk about this issue—perhaps the most complex and intractable geopolitical issue of the modern era and which is an information war as much as it is a real life one—we are doing so not only based on a differing set of perspectives but a differing set of assumptions about what other people already know and about what has happened already in real life.
Perhaps it is premature to call these varying streams of information different realities. Everyone on Wednesday that I saw was, after all, at least discussing the same topic. But if there is already this much variation within my bubble—mostly the educated left—then how much variation is there across society? How much more will there be going forward?
It’s a good thing, then, that the monoculture isn’t dead. We can all watch The Eras Tour movie together at the funeral of our shared reality.
That’s all for this edition of Cansler Culture.
Maybe I’ll try and do something more optimistic for the next one? No promises.