The Digital Schizophrenia of the Social Media Age

"We no longer live within a shared cultural reality but rather through an endless cascade of algorithmic stimuli, severed from context, each post and comment signaling nothing beyond itself."

Reality, once arguably understood as a continuous thread within culture and within the individual, is unraveling in real time in the age of late stage digital capitalism. The infinite scroll of apps, and the cluttered, fragmented, vitriolic discourses of comment sections has in many ways seemed to have liquefied historical consciousness, leaving us stranded in an endless present, where meaning dissolves before it can solidify. Social media, artificial intelligence, and algorithmic content consumption have accelerated what cultural theorist Fredric Jameson diagnosed as the postmodern collapse of historical continuity in his text Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Utilizing philosopher Jacques Lacan’s notion of schizophrenia as a “breakdown in the signifying chain”—where language, symbols, and narrative structure fragment into free-floating signifiers—Jameson’s text reads as an eerily prescient framework for our current digital malaise. We no longer live within a shared cultural reality but rather through an endless cascade of algorithmic stimuli, severed from context, each post and comment signaling nothing beyond itself.

Jameson describes this condition with unsettling precision:

“In the cultural text, the isolated Signifier is no longer an enigmatic state of the world or an incomprehensible yet mesmerizing fragment of language, but rather something closer to a sentence in free-standing isolation.

Think, for example, of the experience of John Cage’s music, in which a cluster of material sounds (on the prepared piano for example) is followed by a silence so intolerable that you cannot imagine another sonorous chord coming into existence, and cannot imagine remembering the previous one well enough to make any connection with it if it does.”

In a digital context, each piece of content—each post, each short-form video, each AI-generated image or video—operates as just such an isolated signifier, severed from continuity. Meaning does not accumulate, within the relentless onslaught of production and consumption it is transmuted into a loop of disconnected micro-moments, leaving the mind unable to establish a coherent historical or ideological frame. The algorithmic media landscape functions much like Beckett’s Watt, where, as Jameson notes, "a primacy of the present sentence in time ruthlessly disintegrates the narrative fabric that attempts to reform around it."

The Fractured Timeline: A Culture Without History

Once upon a time, culture followed a timeline. History—albeit always contested—was at least scaffolded by institutions: media, academia, governments, each providing a stable(ish) sense of historical causality from the perspectives of the ideological frameworks they existed within. Today, that scaffolding has all but begun to collapse. Social media, and mass media in general function as a vortex where past, present, and future collapse into an undifferentiated mass of these micro-moments.

A TikTok about the French Revolution appears beside a meme of Donald Trump at a rally, followed by an AI-generated rendering of a non-existent dystopian war. Each fragment exists autonomously, stripped of context or causality. The result? A collective amnesia in which history is no longer a linear unfolding but an aestheticized, endlessly remixable moodboard; the tik-tokification of history one could call it.

Jameson describes this as the “perpetual present” of late capitalism—a condition in which historical depth is replaced by the immediacy of surface, where phenomena of any measure can be distorted or erased from any vantage, for any audience. We no longer remember; we consume, and consumption within algorithmic spaces belies truth and veracity in today’s fast-paced, bite sized digital economy. Jameson, drawing on Marguerite Séchehaye’s Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl, references a patient’s description of a playground scene dissolving into pure materiality during a schizophrenic episode:

Suddenly the signifiers of "school"—the fence, the playground, the bodies of the children—seemed to dissolve into an overwhelming experience of unrelated materiality, a reality in which all the elements were simultaneously present yet held together by no organizing structure, no stable meaning, no narrativizable coherence. (Séchehaye, 1968, p.19)

This is the logic of digital culture: a world of signifiers in pure simultaneity, where the past is as decontextualized as the future is unimaginable.

The Rise of Algorithmic Schizophrenia

Enter the phenomenon of brain rot—a term coined by the internet’s most self-aware addicts to describe the algorithm’s ability to degrade attention, cognition, and the capacity for sustained thought. TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts have engineered a system of cognitive whiplash, feeding the brain a disjointed sequence of hyper-stimulating but intellectually vacuous content. We flick from influencers unboxing luxury goods, to nonsensical, if not downright absurdist meme-ified tiktok videos which are built upon the mashing of tens of cultural references into one 5 second blip, to reaction videos of geopolitical horror, never lingering long enough to engage—only to absorb and move on.

This relentless cycle of novelty mirrors Lacan’s concept of schizophrenia: a world in which meaning never stabilizes, where signifiers—images, words, events—float without anchorage. The result is an epistemic crisis: we are conditioned not to reflect, but to react. Critical thought is replaced by instinctual stimulus-response loops, and the capacity for deep engagement—the very thing required for political resistance, creative thought, or intellectual autonomy—is essentially eroded.

AI, Deepfakes, and the Death of the Signifier

Artificial intelligence is the latest culprit compounding this epistemic rupture, and is the penultimate schizophrenic cultural harbinger. AI-generated news articles, deep fake videos, and synthetic influencers are beginning to blur the boundary between the real and the artificial, producing a media landscape where the authority of the signifier itself is destabilized.

Consider the recent surge in political deepfakes: fabricated videos of world leaders making statements they never uttered. Historical footage documenting world events that never happened. The result is not just misinformation—it’s the systematic deconstruction of factuality. The onslaught of “Is this AI?” comments in every Tiktok’s comment section should tell you that reality itself is beginning to dissolve before our very eyes. If language and imagery can be algorithmically manufactured, then the very foundation of reality—our ability to agree on what is—collapses.

Lacan’s theory of the signifying chain suggests that meaning is produced through relational structures. AI-generated content, however, breaks this system apart, flooding the discourse with signifiers detached from any grounding in reality. Meaning becomes untethered, floating in an abyss of simulation where nothing can be trusted, least of all perception itself.

Hyper-Politics and the Algorithmic Balkanization of Reality

This breakdown in meaning has created a political landscape in which ideology is no longer structured around shared facts but rather around algorithmic virality. Social media functions as an engagement-maximization machine, trapping users in ideological silos that reward emotional intensity over factual coherence.

The result? Parallel realities. QAnon, for instance, would have once remained a fringe conspiracy theory, but in a hyper-politicized digital ecosystem, it metastasized into a self-sustaining world with its own internal logic. Note that in 2021, hundreds of QAnon believers gathered in Dealey Plaza, the site of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, under the false belief that his son, John F. Kennedy Jr.—who died in a plane crash in 1999—would miraculously reappear to announce Donald Trump’s reinstatement as president, with JFK Jr. as his vice president.

The same can be said for hyper-moralizing leftist discourse, where digital subcultures have developed their own insular dialects—language games rooted less in material reality than in the social currency of online ideological purity, wherein there are real world implications for transgression of established rules in said spaces.

Escaping the Abyss: How Do We Reclaim Meaning?

If the social media age is accelerating the breakdown of reality, then, what does resistance look like?

First: media literacy. But not in the outdated sense of “fact-checking.” We need a structural understanding of how digital platforms shape reality—how algorithms mediate discourse, how AI manipulates perception, how history is flattened into consumable fragments. Recognizing these systems is the first step in resisting their pull.

Second: a return to narrative. Postmodernism dismantled grand narratives, but perhaps the task now is to build new ones—not totalizing myths, but frameworks that reconnect history, identity, and politics into something coherent, something that connects and binds humanity, something that transcends political division. Artists, writers, and thinkers must engage in the act of meaning-making, reassembling what has been broken.

In an era where reality is slipping through our fingers, the most radical act might be simply to make sense—to resist the fragmentation, to insist on coherence, and to anchor ourselves in something that remains legible and tangible, even as the digital tide threatens to pull everything else away.

About the Author: Cody Rooney is a writer, editor, creative director, and multimedia artist. Based in Toronto, he is a PhD student specializing in digital and visual culture at Toronto Metropolitan University and serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Liminul Magazine.

Insights & Ideas is a ComCult blog series showcasing the research and expertise of ComCult students. Designed to engage a broad audience, the series features op-ed-style posts that connect academic insights to real-world issues, making complex ideas accessible and relevant. Each entry highlights the unique perspectives and innovative thinking within the ComCult program. We invite you to explore more stories that amplify research and inspire ideas! (News and Events Archives)