Digital platforms tend to favor content in which personal experience and emotion carry strong persuasive value. In this context, anyone who proposes complex analysis or tries to introduce nuance often starts from a communicatively disadvantaged position, because the platform format rewards immediacy, simplicity, aesthetic identification, and instant reaction.
The digital age has shifted the center of gravity of public legitimacy from shareable truth to perceived individual experience. What matters is no longer only what is true or false, but above all who is speaking, what suffering they recount, and what emotional response they manage to stir. In a society built on this mechanism, character formation, rational reasoning, and the pursuit of the common good lose ground to the obsessive construction of individual identity.
In traditional democratic debate, at least as an ideal, the strength of an idea depended on its ability to persuade through shareable arguments. On social media, by contrast, communicative strength depends on the ability to trigger an immediate, superficial emotional response.
«This is how politics dies, intellectuals disappear, and all that remains are influencers and advertising campaigns.»
If every individual or social group builds its narrative mainly around its own subjective experience, it becomes harder to construct a universal language. Conflict no longer concerns only differing interests, but different interpretations and perceptions of reality. And when common ground for discussion disappears, building critical mass, collectivization, and unity of purpose become nearly impossible.
What happens when a society rewards aesthetics and obscures reason? Some of the most evident symptoms are: reduced capacity for individual and collective sacrifice, less perseverance, a weaker sense of belonging, the development of interchangeable, performative individual identities, greater vulnerability to consumerist trends, and politics that grows ever more symbolic and less concrete.
The great movements of the twentieth century, for all their limitations, were oriented mainly toward transforming the material structures of society: work, wages, education, welfare, civil rights, political representation. They were not aesthetic struggles, they were concrete collective struggles.
"They were not aesthetic struggles, they were concrete collective struggles."
A significant part of contemporary identity movements, by contrast, focuses its attention on the symbolic and cultural recognition of individual identity.
When a society loses its formative institutions — family, school, community, unions, cultural spaces, parties, associations, religions — and they are replaced by digital ecosystems based on consumption and image, identities become more fragile in the face of consumerism, incapable of organizing collective thought, more fluid, and more dependent on external recognition.
