I am Being Suffocated by the Media Bubble and So are You

October 27, 2025 Newsletter

Collage by Jasmine Nguyen

A few mornings ago I was getting ready, and I was thinking about the Prattler. Specifically, I was thinking about the newsletter and how much more time can pass before it becomes apparent that, behind my not writing it, I am hiding two ugly truths: a complete lack of inspiration and an utter absence of creative impulse. It gets dark by 6pm, almost nothing feels intellectually stimulating, and as I’m writing this the New York Times headline is: “Trump Says He’d ‘Love’ a Third Term, and Recent M.R.I Was ‘Perfect’”. Happy Fall!

As we all know, the global order as it’s existed for the past seventy or so years is in a free fall. Algorithms and media bubbles, however, feel air tight. The media bubble is a wonderful feature of the digital panopticon that is our social media algorithms. The ways in which we engage with content, and the types of content with which we’re interacting, is being tracked in order to collect data on our media habits. This data then gets analyzed to try and predict what kinds of media

we will be most attracted to, so as to keep us on the platform for as long as possible.

Thus begins the onslaught of analogous content all over our feeds. This is the reason that we’ve all had at least one experience of feeling like the whole wide world (on the Internet) shares our same opinions and politics, leaving us completely dumbfounded when world events remind us that this is a simple fallacy (say, I don’t know when Trump was elected. Twice.). Thank you

media bubble!

‘Media bubble’ has been a buzz-word for the past decade, and we’re all well aware that we are being fed content that we are already most likely to align and agree with. Yet, because these algorithms are constantly being fine-tuned to increase the addictive nature of the platforms they program, I would argue that they have become so sensitive that these sites are starting to feel unusable.

Take Instagram for example. At 1:41pm, I went on my explore page as an experiment, and searched ballet. I spent about fifteen minutes scrolling through ballet reels. By 2:03pm my explore page was a homogenous mosaic of ballet related posts. Similarly, on my YouTube recommendations there are currently four videos dissecting the alt-right; five videos analyzing online dating culture; and out of the twenty-two first videos that are suggested, nine of them are

by people I already watch regularly.

With YouTube specifically, I feel like the algorithm has become such an echo chamber that it’s become a guessing-game of what same talking points are going to be repeated and masticated in what video, without ever needing to watch them in the first place. In a way, I think it’s poetic that through their outpour of the most like-minded and un-challenging content being force fed to us, it looks like these algorithms are on their way to making themselves obsolete. It takes very little time for the avalanche of sameness that is our media

feeds to become utterly mind-numbing.

The bad news is that, for the near future at least, we can expect to be subjugated to even more of these content bubbles with the rise of AI. In Art in the After-Culture: Capitalist Crisis & Cultural Strategy, Ben Davis puts it nicely: “In a situation of intensive corporate control over the attention space, the dominant application of AI for culture is most likely refining ways to make our entertainment feeds more addictive – encouraging us to graze on the “new enough” permutations of things we like [...] By default, AI aesthetics tend toward constructing an idea of culture in which any non-AI subjective decision that interrupts the flow of consumption is minimized as unprofitable dead time. [...] You don’t need to talk to a friend for a recommendation of something that fits your mood, to seek out a critic whose opinion you like, or even to waste time personally deciding. Ideally you just get a selection of perpetually “good enough” options.”

Nothing feels interesting or inspiring right now because social media, and algorithmically curated streaming platforms have become all-consuming echo chambers, doing everything they can to make sure we keep on clicking. They are pervasive, and much like the air that we breathe, there is no outside of them.

Welcome to the glut of uniform content and easy consumption. Be prepared to get bored.

Ksenija Carleton

Editorial Assistant