This post suggests that social media feels like an "Ego machine" where "my thoughts, my documents, my desires feed a market of other individuals' thoughts, documents, desires." This, says the author, is because of the network architecture. "The 'ego machine' model can be represented as a set of interconnected nodes - individuals .... But social relationships in real life feel more like a cellular model, shown on the right. Cells are not individuals, they are 'dialogues' or 'codes of communication'... They are active processes with a boundary that separates an 'environment' which is negotiated and separated from a set of 'internal operations.'" I might disagree with some details of this analysis, but I think the overall picture is right, though I would add that we need our own personal environments along with the socially negotiated environments.
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