when everything becomes a fragment

how algorithms broke our ability to interpret stories

There’s an exhibit in the Museum of Modern Art that consists of six television sets peeking out from behind a slashed canvas. The screens present disjointed, incomplete sequences, only visible through the haphazard gashes in the fabric.

As you try to look past the canvas, you begin to understand that there’s more to the image that you can’t see. Each television displays its own, larger picture—and yet you can only view the fragments that the artist chose to represent.

The same is true on social media, where millions of videos are uploaded every day but you only receive the very few that the algorithm selected for you. This process, like the gashes in the fabric, initially seems random but is actually designed by the creators of the medium to reflect specific priorities. As I outline in my previous post, that means that all videos on the “For You Page” are first filtered out by platform “terms of service,” then by whether they generate engagement, and then by whether they fit your particular demographic. In the end, the content you see is little more than a micro-gash in the immense canvas of social media.

A very oversimplified visualization of the algorithmic selection process.

The art metaphor isn’t coincidental. The work in question, TV-Dé-coll/age No. 1 by Wolf Vostell, was created out of his concern for “the televisual environment becoming dominant” in communication. The artist believed that video technology frames ideas in a way that robs people of their ability to reason; the canvas is therefore a tongue-in-cheek warning of how the medium affects the message.

Today, video is so integrated into our consumption patterns that it’s become encapsulated within an entirely new medium, with an entirely new bias of its own. We view everything through an “algorithmic gaze,” forgetting the reality of how messages were brought to us in the first place (let alone how they’re contained). This can affect how we ultimately construct our idea of reality.

I’m especially drawn to how Vostell’s TV canvas intentionally tells a disjointed story. Each television has its own thing going on, in a way that makes it difficult to piece together a single narrative. All content gets reduced to ephemeral flashes, each one distracting from the next.

How different is that from the “flow state” of online scrolling? Each video appears in isolation, disconnected from other videos on the same topic. A viewer perceiving a discussion unfold might have to first watch a dozen unrelated videos before seeing a response to an original point. As such, we might lose the overall picture.

For example, I just got a video on my For You Page of Bernie Sanders reacting to Trump’s address to Congress. Immediately after that, a “lifestyle” video; an architecture video; 4 advertisements, a TikTok live, and a funny animal video. Only on my ninth scroll did I get another video from the congressional address, following Trump himself from a completely different angle.

If I’m trying to extrapolate a mental understanding of the speech, how do the eight intermediary videos affect that? What about the fact that my two angles of the event came from different temporal and narrative perspectives? The political message becomes incoherent, meaning I can’t as readily piece together the gestalt of what’s happening—and that’s not even considering how most of it is still behind the canvas.

The result is that we become politically passive. Each moment we spend scrolling is a moment we replace objective reality with this separate, fragmentary reality. We construct half-stories out of incomprehensible flashes, rather than more concretely understanding events as they occur.

---

If you liked this post, please consider reading my upcoming book Algospeak, which examines how algorithms affect our language! A pre-order is really helpful for the book to gain traction when it comes out :)