"Hey, did you see this thing online?"

I find myself replying "No." almost every time.

My observation is that a lot of people have been spouting objective "facts" that are based on what they see online. What is referenced in real life conversations is based on what they saw online and not on the experience they get or their own observation. I find it hard to relate to other people because I don't share the same feed as them. Interests become blurred, and the conversation stalls at a reference I was never shown.

The question itself is not new. People have always bonded over things none of them witnessed: the game last night, the headline that morning, the episode everyone watched at the same hour. That talk was mediated too, but the mediation was common. Everyone had been handed roughly the same picture, and so the picture could stand in for a shared world.

What strikes me is that the question survived while the shared picture did not. "Did you see this?" is still asked as if the answer should be yes, as if the speaker's world and mine overlap enough to begin from. It is less a request for information than a small gesture of belonging, a way of checking that we are standing on the same ground. But the feed is assembled for one person at a time. Two people can scroll for the same hours in the same room and come away with nothing in common, and each will still speak as though addressing everyone.

The question is still asked in the grammar of a public that no longer exists. My "No." only shows me the fringes of these feed bubbles we live in, if the borders of these bubbles can even be considered as having "fringes," because I don't think they are easy to pop.

Pseudo-first-hand experiences

In a way the online reality is becoming the immediate pseudo-first-hand experience, and I am not sure how this is evolving, but I believe it is making everyone have a skewed version of their own reality that also injects a false sense of confidence into everyone.

I'd argue the "pseudo" passes for first-hand because of how little of the source survives in memory. What we saw stays; where we saw it fades. A clip from three days ago sits beside things actually lived, and the small label that said "I saw this online" quietly drops off.^[1] The content format makes it easier for consumption to blur into memory. Videos are filmed at eye level, held in the hand, spoken straight to me. It does not feel like being told something. It feels like seeing it.

The confidence comes from the same place. Having everything within reach starts to feel like knowing it.^[2] So the "facts" arrive in conversation with the certainty of a witness and the scope of an encyclopedia, though they come from neither. What Heidegger called idle talk, understanding everything without ever making the thing one's own, used to belong to an anonymous public. Now each person carries a private public of their own, and hears everyone else's as hearsay.

The ouroboros

Perhaps this is Baudrillard's hyperreality taken to another level, where reality is shaped by what one actively consumes and not by some chance, passive encounter that feeds cognitive bias. It is an ouroboros of cognitive bias that is in itself allowing these types of reality to form in one's head.

There is a loop from the screen source and us as the receiver of the feed, but I am unsure of how it progresses. The feed is tuned to whatever keeps me looking. Then the algorithm interprets that I am interested in something if I spend a few seconds of my attention on it. The way the algorithm interprets my attention somehow keeps the loop turning. In a sense the feed scrolls me as much as I scroll it.

So the ouroboros is less a bias feeding on itself than a bias that has moved out of the head. A habit of mind becomes a piece of machinery, and the machinery hands the habit back as if it were the world. It shapes not only what I remember but what I expect, and so what I am able to notice when something else happens in front of me.

And yet I do not think the machine is purely to blame. Remove the algorithm and people mostly go looking for the same things anyway.^[3] What is stimulating gets attention. The bubble is co-authored. It is tragic in a sense that there is no one outside to blame, only a preference returned to its owner at scale.

What would break this conjecture is simple enough to say. If people who share a feed still sorted what they saw online from what they lived, and said so when they spoke, then the pseudo-first-hand would be my projection and not their condition. I can only say it is not what I keep hearing.

A skewed reality or a simulacrum

I wrote "a skewed version of their own reality," and I also wrote "hyperreality taken to another level." I have come to think the two do not sit together, and I would rather leave them in tension than choose too early.

To call something skewed is to assume a straight line it bends away from: a lived world still there to return to, only obscured. That is the more hopeful picture. The harsher one says the map now comes before the territory, and there is no longer a straight line to measure against. If that is the case, "skewed" is a word without a ruler.

Perhaps what I am noticing is the passage from the first to the second: people used to speak from their own observation, and are now speaking from feed-facts while feeling nothing missing. My "No.", as a refusal to acknowledge or a failure to recognize their feed-reality, would then be what is left over, the one place where the gap still registers as a gap. But this reading quietly assumes that my side of the "No." has kept hold of the real, and that is the assumption I have the least right to.

If there is still a real being skewed, whose is it, and who gets to measure the distortion? If there is not, what is my sense of distance from these "facts" actually measuring? I do not know, and I am not sure the question can be answered from inside the situation it describes.

The misaligned gear

I have been writing as if from a perspective with a cautious lens, outside these bubbles looking in. But I know that I am making this conjecture also based on what I see online. To be off the shared feed is to be on a smaller one, more chosen perhaps, but still a bubble with its own "facts" and its own confidence. What I can honestly claim is a mismatch. And being mismatched makes the structure visible, the way a misaligned gear shows the mechanism that a smooth one keeps hidden. The "No." does not give me access to the real. It shows me the seams. In a sense the margin never escapes the text; it only exposes how the text is put together.

What I cannot tell from here is whether the seams I see belong to their feed or to mine.

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1. Marcia K. Johnson, Shahin Hashtroudi, and D. Stephen Lindsay, "Source Monitoring," Psychological Bulletin 114, no. 1 (1993). ↩︎

2. Matthew Fisher, Mariel K. Goddu, and Frank C. Keil, "Searching for Explanations: How the Internet Inflates Estimates of Internal Knowledge," Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 144, no. 3 (2015). ↩︎

3. Andrew M. Guess et al., "How Do Social Media Feed Algorithms Affect Attitudes and Behavior in an Election Campaign?" Science 381 (2023); Brendan Nyhan et al., "Like-Minded Sources on Facebook Are Prevalent but Not Polarizing," Nature 620 (2023).
   /pub ↩︎