86 SVETOVI / WORLDS leto 3, št. 2, julij 2025
ABSTRACT
Castells’ fundamental first volume of his Information Age trilogy entitled The Rise of the
Network Society (1996) significantly overlooks the social phenomena that comprise and lead
back to insularisation in online networks and abroad. As the call for this special issue notes,
“the world we live in today is characterised by high levels of interconnectivity, codependence,
and overwhelming amounts of information” , which “shapes our desires” and “evoke[s] ideas
of isolation, remoteness, and detachment from everyday worries.” (Oroz and Simonič 2023)
Unfortunately, these often unconscious desires to disconnect from McLuhan’s celebrated
“global village” and Jameson’s unsavory “junkspace” , as repressed desires, may manifest as
anti-social sentiments that develop longitudinally under the conditions of what I theorise as
the virtual network city.
KEYWORDS: network city, social media, alienation, insularisation, digital environment
IZVLEČEK
Castellsov temeljni prvi del trilogije Information Age (Informacijska doba) z naslovom The
Rise of the Network Society / Vzpon družbe omrežij (1996) pomenljivo spregleda družbene
pojave, ki vključujejo in vodijo k izolaciji zaradi rabe spletnih omrežji. Kot je zapisano v vabi-
lu k oddaji prispevkov za to posebno številko, je »za svet, v katerem danes živimo, značilna
visoka stopnja medsebojne povezanosti, soodvisnosti in ogromna količina informacij«, kar
»oblikuje naše želje« in »vzbuja ideje o izoliranosti, oddaljenosti in odmaknjenosti od vsa-
kodnevnih skrbi« (Oroz and Simonič 2023). Žal se te pogosto nezavedne želje po odklopu
1.01. Original scientific article
DOI 10.4312/svetovi.3.2.86-104
The Virtual Network City
and the Long- T ail of Social
Media Alienation
Virtualno omrežno mesto in dolgi rep odtujenosti
zaradi družbenih medijev
David Christopher
87 V ol. 3, Nr. 2, July 2025
David Christopher
The Virtual Network City and the
Long-T ail of Social Media Alienation
od McLuhanove slavne »globalne vasi« in Jamesonovega neprijetnega »junkspacea«, kot
potlačenih želja, lahko manifestirajo kot antisocialna čustva, ki se razvijajo v okviru tega, kar
teoretiziram kot virtualno omrežno mesto.
KLJUČNE BESEDE: omrežno mesto, družbeni mediji, odtujenost, izolacija, digitalno okolje
INTRODUCTION
Are cities inevitable? I don’t intend this in the sense of some sort of deterministic teleology
of human nature like a modernist grand narrative as Marx or Francis Fukuyama might have
it. I refer to the current historical conditions of post-industrialism, mass global populations,
and digital network societies. It has been more than two decades since the recognition of
the tectonic importance of Manuel Castells’ fundamental first volume of his Information
Age trilogy entitled The Rise of the Network Society (1996) as well as since the nearly contem -
poraneous advent of the W eb 2.0, which gave rise to the ubiquitous forms of social media
with which we are familiar today. In that time, a full generation of digital natives have come
of age in an era that has never been absent of these forms of social media. In 2010 Castells
writes: “The constitution of a new culture based on multimodal communication and digital
information processing creates a generational divide between those born before the Internet
Age (1969) and those who grew up being digital” (Castells 2010: xviii). However, I argue
that Castells significantly overlooks the social phenomena that comprise and lead back to
insularisation in online networks and abroad.
The problem in building virtual societies around a capitalist-society determined nar -
cissistic self-commodification that occurs in social media arenas is the long-tail of alienation
in which the utopian potential of an originally democratic internet is subsumed into inevita-
ble insularisation. In terms of the repressed social desire to disconnect from the information
overload of perpetual connection to the network city, these alienating narcissistic behaviours
emerge as slow-mounting negative micro-responses that cumulate over time and promote a
propensity to disconnect, either literally or emotionally, from even long-lived friends and
family connections that would have remained intact under different conditions. As the call
for this special issue notes, “it is important to recognise that isolation still has a pull that
captures our imaginations, invades our daydreams, and shapes our desires. For many people,
romantic notions of secluded and remote places are still alluring utopias that evoke ideas of
isolation, remoteness, and detachment from everyday worries” (Oroz and Simonič 2023).
Unfortunately, these often unconscious desires to disconnect from McLuhan’s celebrated
“global village” and Jameson’s unsavory “junkspace” , as repressed desires, may manifest as an-
ti-social sentiments that develop longitudinally under the conditions of what I call “network
cities” . This phenomenon gives rise to a specific formation of “oases of different temporal
rhythms that emerge amidst the hustle and bustle of [network] cities” and that float like is -
lands of insularisation in a sea of interactive media activity, separate from the wider ocean of
the web while also remaining globally contiguous with it. Network cities are no longer strict-
ly physical communities tethered to geography and constrained by proximity, but virtual/
88 SVETOVI / WORLDS leto 3, št. 2, julij 2025
digital ones that emerge between the broad network society that Castells describes and the
smaller network communities that he observes. This phenomenon provides an opportunity
to apply these insights to a longitudinal analysis of both the progressive and alienating effects
of social media that emerge in these insularised city “islands” .
Arguably, Castells’ contribution to understanding the contemporary state of po-
litical economy is as important as Marx’s in his day, while it suffers from some of the same
shortcomings in its broad political economic perspective and from the economic determin-
ism that cultural studies has been wont to mitigate. For all of its insight, his some five-hun -
dred-page tome and the other two books in his trilogy do not go far enough in the direc-
tion of understanding the structures that make up the very network society he postulated.
Castells does not make any significant gesture towards theorizing or defining these factions
using the useful metaphor of the material urban city to understand its digital counterpart.
Indeed, a further distinction is that the network city emerges as entirely autonomous of the
contiguous geographic parameters that tethers them to economically motivated flows in
the material world, although it operates in an immanent relationship to the so-called real
world. The network city comprises a phenomenon of virtual social homophily (rather than
strictly economic determinants) and is characterised by the flows of social harmony and
alienation that are carried into the digital realm from the material world. The very nature of
what we understand as a city is experienced very differently for those born into the digital
virtual world Castells describes, and the new organisation of time, space, and social hierar-
chies within the network society have consequences in both the digital and material social
realms.
In summarizing the import of Castells’ text, the Wikipedia page surveying his con-
tributions quite accurately reports that Castells’ theory of the Information Age argues that
“our physical selves exist in different places and experience different cultures, but the mind
has essentially migrated into the world of the internet and the television” (Wikipedia n.d.).
Castells claims that the “communication system” of the “information society”
is a system in which reality itself (that is, people’s material/symbolic existence) is entirely captured,
fully immersed in a virtual image setting, in the world of make believe, in which appearances are
not just on the screen through which experience is communicated, but they become the experience.
[...] [I]t absorbs in the same multimedia text the whole of human experience. (Castells 2010: 404)
Summarily, Castells concludes that “[l]ocalities become disembodied from their
cultural, historical, geographical meaning, and reintegrated into functional networks, or
into image collages, inducing a space of flows that substitutes for the space of places” (Cas -
tells 2010: 406). According to Castells, “[t]he global city is not a place, but a process. A
process by which centers of production and consumption of advanced services, and their
ancillary local societies, are connected in a global network” (Castells 2010: 416). However,
while Castells offers compelling economic, historical, and nationalist political evidence to
support his theses, he often falls short of offering a nuanced micro-perspective on the social
politics and organisations that characterise the nascent network communities he observes.
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David Christopher
The Virtual Network City and the
Long-T ail of Social Media Alienation
Moreover, in his second volume, The Power of Identity (1997), for example, he argues that
even “cultural communes […] [work] on raw materials from history, geography, language,
and environment. So, they are constructed, but materially constructed, around reactions
and projects historically/geographically determined” (Castells 2011: 65). Indeed, as much
as Castells offers astonishingly prescient understandings of the virtual/digital arena of net -
work communities, his descriptions remain tethered to the geographic nodes of flows, most -
ly economically determined, that he theorises.
In this regard, with respect to his more nuanced theorisations noted above, the earli-
er insights (or pessimistic apocalyptic prognostications) of Jean Baudrillard are instructive.
Baudrillard outlines at the beginning of Simulacra and Simulation (1981) that the virtual
map of reality has come to supersede the actual landscape so that human experience is lost
within a virtual reality. As Castells extrapolates: “Thus there is no separation between ‘real -
ity’ and symbolic representation. [...] [W]hat is historically specific to the new communica -
tion system, organized around the electronic integration of all communication modes [...] is
not its inducement of virtual reality but the construction of real virtuality” (Castells 2010:
403). Similarly, with specific reference to the notion of a city, Baudrillard discusses “the dis -
integration of the city itself, which is transplanted outside the city and treated as a hyperreal
model, as the nucleus of a metropolitan area based on synthesis that no longer has anything
to do with a city” (Baudrillard 1994: 78). Baudrillard is still, in fact, referring to the material
world, but he begins down a theoretical path now widely understood as an entirely virtual
“hyper-reality” . Indeed, in turn echoing DeBord’s Society of the Spectacle, Baudrillard states
that “[t]he social, the social phantasmagoria, is now nothing but a special effect, obtained
by the design of participating networks converging in emptiness under the spectral image”
(Baudrillard 1994: 107). Beneath the hyper-pessimistic hyperbole of Baudrillard’s text are
the beginnings of some deeply insightful understandings of the coming virtual community
that can exist solely in cyber-space.
Under these conditions, Castells explains that such communities exist “by their per-
vasiveness, their multifaceted decentralization, and their flexibility. They sprawl as colonies
of micro-organisms” (Castells 2010: 385). It is only logical that some of these pervasive com -
munities of hyper-reality should collapse entirely into the virtual/digital realm. Again, with
explicit reference to the phenomenon of the city, Castells states that
the development of these loosely interrelated ex-urban constellations emphasizes the functional
interdependence of different units and processes in a given urban system over very long distances,
minimizing the role of territorial contiguity, and maximizing the communication networks in all
their dimensions. (Castells 2010: 64)
Castells argues for the “existence of material supports of simultaneity that do not rely
on physical contiguity, since this is precisely the case of the dominant social practices of the
Information Age” and concludes that “the network of communication is the fundamental
spatial configuration: places do not disappear, but their logic and their meaning become
absorbed in the network” (Castells 2010: 442).
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From this point of departure, I attempt to theorise the digital city, a virtual urban
organisation, as a way of understanding the social, capitalistic, and ecological consequences
of the exclusively digital side of the global network society. My thesis defines the “net-city”
as networked both within and outside its borders. Just as power dynamics, or at least class
hierarchies, are striated or rhizomatic within and between real physical cities, so too are
they online. In the material world, New Y ork is cosmopolitan while L.A. is neo-vogue,
but neither are autonomous. Similarly, Facebook might be considered something of a dig-
ital “retirement community” for ostensibly older participants while Insta is a neo-vogue
community, but there are netizens that belong to both, cross-overs. Here are echoes of
Raymond Williams’ cultural categories of “‘Dominant, Residual, and Emergent, ’ [which]
both explains how dominant social structures maintain their dominance, while at the same
time other social groups and in fact individuals can contradict or subvert those cultures”
(mrjerrerio 2016: n.p.). More practically, just as consumerism has been a market-oriented
determiner of social status in capitalist society, invisible algorithms are less democratically
slicing up the digital social environment by political bias more than by mere consumerism
(but always in the service of advertising and the audience commodity). Netizens become
members of social groups that expand outward by familiarity with others as they would
into the social arena of the material world but that remain socially insularised based on
increasing levels of homophily.
THE NETWORK CITY
Early in the updated preface to his text, Castells offers an interpenetrating definition that
presents a useful starting point for theorising the network city:
[C]ities were born from the concentration of the functions of command and control, of coordi-
nation, of exchange of goods and services, of diverse and interactive social life. In fact, cities are,
from their onset, communication systems, increasing the chances of communication through
physical contiguity. [...] On the other hand, social practices as communication practices also took
place at a distance through transportation and messaging. [...] This new form of spatiality is what
I conceptualized as the space of flows: the material support of simultaneous social practices
communicated at a distance. It [...] relies on the development of localities as nodes of these
communication networks, and the connectivity of activities located in these nodes [...] by infor-
mation flows. (Castells 2010: xxxi–xxxii)
Castells goes on to argue that “a decentralization of activities, residence, and services
with mixed land uses, and an undefined boundary of functionality [...] extends the territory
of this nameless city to wherever its networks go” (Castells 2010: xxxii). Castells states that
[w]hat is important in the location of advanced services is the micro-network of the high-level
decision-making process, based on face-to-face relationships, linked to a macro-network of
decision implementation, which is based on electronic communication networks. In other words,
meeting face to face to make financial or political deals is still indispensable. (Castells 2010: xxxvi)
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Long-T ail of Social Media Alienation
Castells refers to these geographic locations as “nodes” (Castells 2010: xxxviii)
through which economic activity circulates.
This materially tethered understanding of the city, however, is not, in fact, absolute.
In Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody (2008), tellingly subtitled “How Change Happens
When People Come T ogether” , he explains. “Now that we have ridiculously easy group-for-
mation, [...] structure is relaxed, and the result is that organizations that assume geography
as a core organizing principle, even ones that have been operating that way for centuries, are
now facing challenges to that previously bedrock principle” (Shirky 2008: 155). More recent -
ly, one of the great insights achieved out of the economic impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic
is that face-to-face meetings are decreasingly necessary across a wide range of social and vo-
cational activities. Castells counters that “[o]ur societies are increasingly structured around
a bipolar opposition between the Net and the self ” (Castells 2010: 3). However, this under -
standing may not be universally accurate. A network community brings the net and the self
together outside of the economic determinants that Castells surveys but alongside the rise
of the non-vocational identity constructions that he observes. He explains that
few people in the world feel identified with the global, cosmopolitan culture that populates the
global networks and becomes the worship of the mega-node elites. In contrast, most people feel
a strong regional or local identity. [...] The contradictory relationship between meaning and power
is manifested by a growing disassociation between what I conceptualized as the space of flows and
the space of places. Although there are places in the space of flows and flows in the space of places,
cultural and social meaning is defined in place terms, while functionality, wealth, and power are
defined in terms of flows. (Castells 2010: xxxix)
However, it is just as evident that the distinction between the phenomenon of flows
and the materiality of places is collapsing, more on an inter-personal and social level than on
an economic one. Iain Chamber’s theorisation of postmodernity highlights this fact:
Post modernism, whatever form its intellectualizing might take, has been fundamentally antici-
pated in the metropolitan cultures of the last twenty years: among the electronic signifiers of
cinema, television and video, in recording studios and record players, in fashion and youth styles,
in all those sounds, images and diverse histories that are daily mixed, recycled and ‘scratched’
together on that giant screen which is the contemporary city (cited in Harvey 1991: 60–61).
Indeed, while the network city has overlaps and connections to the material world, it
can exist as an autonomous digital phenomenon in its own right.
Castells admits that “[v]irtual communities seem to be stronger than observers usu-
ally give them credit for. There is substantial evidence of reciprocal supportiveness on the
Net, even between users with weak ties to each other” (Castells 2011: 388). Martin Lister et
al. add that “[g]iven that our everyday and ‘common-sense’ understandings of community
have at least in part been determined by spatial relationships and a sense of belonging to a
place, then the metaphor extends into thinking about belonging with one another in par-
ticular ‘spaces’ in the non-place of cyberspace” (Lister et al. 2003: 172–173). Bertha Chin
argues that
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[i]f [Benedict] Anderson’s [imagined] community members used media and cultural artefacts
such as newspapers and novels to maintain a sense of connectedness with one another, then
members of Internet communities made use of computers and the various networks and soft‒
ware applications such as the W orld Wide W eb and Internet browsers to mediate and maintain
their connection to one another in the space of newsgroups, mailing lists, chat forums and social
networking sites that double as communities. (Chin 2010: 122–123)
Chin extends this insight from Mary Chayko’s argument that such community mem-
bers “maintain their connectedness mentally and may even exist without any of their mem-
bers ever meeting in literal space, as in an Internet community” (Chayko 2002: 41). Castells
adds that “[t]he web allowed for groupings of interests and projects in the Net, overcoming
the time-costly chaotic browsing of the pre-www Internet. On the basis of these groupings,
individuals and organizations were able to interact meaningfully on what has become, lit-
erally, a world wide web of individualized, interactive communication” (Castells 2010: 383).
Again, however, Castells does not go much beyond “groupings” to describe this strictly vir-
tual community.
Otherwise, Castells spends much of his text outlining how this society comes into ex-
istence through already factionalised digital communities. In contrast, “Barry W ellman has
shown in a stream of consistent findings over the years that what has emerged in advanced
societies is what he calls ‘personal communities’: ‘an individual’s social network of informal,
interpersonal ties, ranging from a half-dozen intimates to hundreds of weaker ties. [...] Both
group communities and personal communities operate on-line as well as off-line’” (Castells
2010: 387). T o this, Bertha Chin adds:
Rather than just continuing the assumption that fan and/or fan fiction communities are formed
as one general, homogenous community that appears to unify the various fan practitioners (fan
fiction authors, fan video producers, fan artists, and the like), [...] smaller, fringe groups [...] have
dispersed from major ones to form sets of new and differential communities. (Chin 2010: 155)
From these understandings it is clear that the online environment has become one of
significant interpersonal interactions and broad individual migrations from within the great
community of the internet.
However, even the term “community” no longer captures the breadth of “urbanisa-
tion” that certain networks have attracted. The sheer size of some online social media mem -
berships defies the grassroots communal nature of the very idea of “community” . Eli Pariser
explains, for example, “When I joined MoveOn in 2001, we had about five hundred thousand
U .S. members. T oday, there are 5 million members – making it one of the largest advocacy
groups in America, significantly larger than the NRA” (Pariser 2011: 8). On the social level,
there are even celebrities within the network cities, either social media or fan-fic superstars
who have garnered an online following, or real-life celebrities epitomised in George T akei’s
online Facebook group. According to Kirsten Pullen, “celebrities from all forms of media
engage in live, interactive, online discussions with their fans, especially when promoting a
new film, special television programme, new season, or music release” (Pullen 2004: 84). Ian
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The Virtual Network City and the
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Bogost indicates that politically-motivated interactions also find social life in the network
city: “Blogs and meetups also take advantage of the spatial property of the computer, creating
coherent environments for voters to explore. Meetups even span the gap between virtual and
physical spaces” (Bogost 2010: 124). However, organised state politics are of little relevance
in the network city because they are anarchist in that there is no formal governance (beyond
the commercial political economy of media platform ownership) and because they emerge
relatively spontaneously. In any case, the scope and migratory possibilities of membership
in these social media is better understood as a full-fledged city replete with alienation and
anonymity more than any sort of cohesive or socially unified community.
In order to better understand the dynamics and constitution of the network city, a
useful point of departure is the notion of concentric circles of social media “ties” indicated
by Barry W ellman’s findings cited above. Robin Dunbar’s “magic number” of a maximum of
500 social relations is the theoretical correlative upon which W ellman’s findings are predi -
cated. However, as Dunbar goes on to explain, this number is only one in a series of social
“layers” that is reflected in online social media.
In humans, these layers have values that approximate 5, 15, 50 and 150, and extend beyond this in
at least two further layers to 500 and 1500. The first three layers have been identified in several
online datasets and ... appear to be a consequence of a constraint on available social time combined
with a relationship between time invested in a relationship and its quality (as rated in terms of
emotional closeness). The two outermost layers (at 500 and 1500) correspond, respectively, to
acquaintances (people we would not consider as personal friends or family, but know well enough
to have a conversation with) and to the number of faces we can put names to. (Dunbar 2016: 2)
However, this concentric circles theory is problematically quantitative and only super-
ficially considers the nuances of the social composition. Castells reports how “current research
suggests that North Americans usually have more than one thousand interpersonal ties. Only
half a dozen of them are intimate and no more than fifty are significantly strong. Y et, taken
together a person’s other 950+ ties are important sources of information, support, compan-
ionship and sense of belonging” (Castells 2010: 389) – a digital imagined community. I pro -
pose a hypothesis that extends Dunbar’s magic number, and even his outer limit of one thou-
sand five hundred, into a much wider network city where even weaker ties comprising a mere
cumulation of “followers” rather than any sort of real social connection come into contact.
The components that comprise the network city can be quite arbitrarily selected from
any one of a number of urban constructs, but almost any that is chosen has an allegorical
corollary. If we understand “suburbs” in the material city to be on the outskirts of the urban
centre, heavily residential, populated mostly by a neo-liberal middle class with well-main-
tained lawns and gentrified post-modern clean lines of residential landscaping and property
division, then the network city equivalent is the cumulation of well-curated social media
pages with tasteful and conservative meme posts visited by a specific fifty to one hundred
and fifty population of homophilic “friends” with limited social media interaction beyond
that arena. The material downtown core, replete with corporate skyscrapers and “boojie”
food services outlets to serve them, finds its network city equivalent in edifices of profes -
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sional pages and groups such as the corporate intranets sustained by university communities
or those comprising LinkedIn, often connected to well-curated and/or paid marketing, and
frequently complemented by gentrified food blogs. The industrial district might be under -
stood as a population of “how to” blogs and Y ou T ube videos, interactive hardware store
websites, and Amazon. The shopping malls would not be Amazon, actually, because the
conceit of malls is generally organised around ambulation in a crowded physical space, even
if anonymously, whereas Amazon tends to be an isolated shopping experience (although it
is slowly incorporating interactive lists and other connectivity affordances). The equivalent
of the shopping mall is better located in shopping on Facebook, where all your connections
can witness the purchasing activity in the stream and then take part by either following suit
or commenting. The inner-city projects are, of course, Instagram. This list is subjective and
not exhaustive, and one could argue for an endless array of material city phenomena and
the network city counterpart for each.
In the online arena, the network city does not have limits beyond socially determined
ones. And yet, the network city is not global. The network is fragmented into cities by broad
material cultures that align most significantly with nationalist-linguistic differences. “Ru -
bert de V entos [...] has suggested [...] the emergence of national identity through the histor-
ical interaction of [a] series of factors: primary factors, such as ethnicity, territory, language,
religion, and the like; generative factors, such as the development of communications and
technology, the formation of cities” (Castells 2011: 31–32). Moreover, according to Castells,
“language, and particularly a fully developed language, is a fundamental attribute of self-rec-
ognition, and of the establishment of an invisible national boundary less arbitrary than ter-
ritoriality, and less exclusive than ethnicity” (Castells 2011: 52). For example, all of China,
especially with its xenophobic clones of W estern media phenomena – Bilibili is Y ou T ube,
W eChat is WhatsApp, etc. – obviously comprises its own network cities. So too does Japan
with its advanced digital technologies and its linguistic monoculture. Most interesting are
the Russian network cities which, for reasons of linguistic proximities, include members
from otherwise hostile factions such as Ukraine, both geographically centred and in diaspo-
ra. While ethnicity can be masked in the virtual realm of avatar identities, linguistic facility
cannot. And like real cities, a network city is criss-crossed by anonymity, community, family
proximity, variation, and gentrification.
The architecture of the network city is especially visible on Instagram or Pinterest,
where the webpage/newsfeed of a specific individual is populated with enough “infrastruc -
ture” – memes, recipes, selfies, weblinks of interest, updates, etc. – that it becomes the virtual
geographic centre of a city of “weak ties” . In the same way, everyone in a city, on a scale from
completely anonymous to close friends, mutually recognises the downtown or city centre
(which they either intentionally approach or actively avoid). However, in this new digital
urban construction, there can certainly be more than one downtown core, subdivisions if
you will, and rather than being organised around economic considerations (the office tower
and the shopping arcade), it is structured around more social and individualised forms of
identity construction. Castells concludes that “[m]ultimedia, as the new system was hastily
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David Christopher
The Virtual Network City and the
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labeled, extend the realm of electronic communication into the whole domain of [social]
life, from home to work, from schools to hospitals, from entertainment to travel” (Castells
2010: 391, 394). Within the architecture of the network city are, of course, the traditional
edifices of capitalism, now moved online.
T ele-banking is being imposed upon customers by both incentives and penalties from the banks.
On-line shopping is exploding, not in opposition to the shopping malls, but in connection with
them, although some traditional stores (for example, bookstores, record stores, perhaps car
dealers) will be either phased out or transformed by on-line competition. Universities are slowly
but surely entering an era of articulation between personal interface and on-line teaching. Personal
communication by e-mail, the most usual CMC activity outside work, is growing exponentially.
(Castells 2010: 391)
However, Castells argues that “the growing importance of on-line transactions does
not imply the disappearance of shopping centers and retail stores. In fact, the trend is the
opposite” (Castells 2010: 426). Nevertheless, this observation may only be based in the phe-
nomenon of the real numbers expansion of the global population. T oday we witness the
significant concentration of corporate mega shopping in the synecdoches of W almart and
Amazon respectively. Baudrillard’s era of a culture bereft by the corporate shopping plaza,
the sort of “junkspace” borrowed by Fredric Jameson in “Future City” from Rem Koolhaas
( Jameson 2003: 69), dominates bricks-and-mortar retail sales, and even individual franchise
outlets for such seemingly insuperable commercial giants as McDonald’s or Tim Horton’s
are shallow husks of their glory days. Especially post-Covid there are blocks and blocks of
derelict small or independent businesses that did not survive; all but the most resilient are
gone, such as the non-profit Age UK used stores (a national chain in its own right), or some -
thing with an always guaranteed clientele such as a local pub that survives on alcohol addic-
tions and as a social hub for many rather than merely a commodity output venue.
From this perspective, even slower migrations than the ones that Pariser describes are
realised longitudinally. In a process that mirrors the mass urbanisation migrations of the 20
th
century, Facebook had a thriving community of over a billion users in the 2010s. In 2024, it
reached a milestone of over three billion users and stands out as the most used online social
media in existence, dwarfing even China’s W eChat with less than 1.5 billion users in 2024.
Nevertheless, while Facebook was a thriving metropolis in the 2010s, even with its excessive
growth, and perhaps even because of it, it begins to become a city of decay as populations
migrate their use habits to younger and more modern communities like Instagram or Tik T ok.
While Facebook’s membership is large, its comparative usage is questionable and remains
popular in this regard primarily with an older generation of social media users. Eventually
Facebook will need to rejuvenate its infrastructure and industry, or become a ghost town.
One can only imagine the volume of digital detritus left behind in such abandoned cities –
oceans of obsolete email addresses, defunct links and webpages, abandoned user names and
passwords, and billions of gigabytes of photos and videos lost in the “web” of the past.
The social migrations made available in the network city are tellingly untethered
from geographic constraints. Clay Shirky outlines one example in which “[i]n 2007 several
96 SVETOVI / WORLDS leto 3, št. 2, julij 2025
conservative parishes of the Episcopalian church in Virginia voted to break off from the
American church in protest over the ordination of an openly gay bishop, Gene Robinson”
(Shirky 2008: 154). The inability of the traditional church to control the insubordination
and subsequent exodus is exemplary of much larger social and less cohesive social organisa-
tion than the term “community” , even the “great” ones, can sustain.
Instead of forming their own break-away church, though, the parishes joined the Nigerian church,
whose Bishop, Peter Akinola, is deeply antagonistic to homosexuals’ involvement in the church
in any form. The idea that a church in Fairfax, Virginia, could simply declare itself part of another
diocese on a different continent upends centuries of tradition. [...] What the Virginia diocese has
done is not to relocate but to de-locate. By announcing that Virginia churches are part of a
Nigerian diocese, in contravention of all geographic sense, the Virginians are doing more than
voting their conscience on the issue of acceptance of gays; they are challenging geography as an
organizing principle. (Shirky 2008: 154–155)
With the advent of Zuckerberg’s Metaverse and other such fully realised VR-gen-
erated “cities” , whose implementation and potential popularity is as yet unmeasurable, it
remains possible that even the urban experiences of ambulating a shopping arcade or visiting
friends “face-to-face” could be entirely uncoupled from geographic contiguity and partially
subsumed into the digital arena.
SOCIAL IMPLICA TIONS AND INSULARISA TION
So how is this understanding of the virtual community valuable in understanding new me-
diated forms of social alienation? I argue that when these virtual constructs are understood
as network cities that foster connections, however superficial, well beyond the outer ring
of weak ties theorised by Dunbar, it offers a better understanding of social flows within the
network cities. In her summary of cinema that is symptomatic of the zeitgeist, Kristen Whis-
sel references a spate of films that
thematize anxieties about the relationship between the individual and the community endemic
to an era defined by processes of globalization and new digital technologies that create new
patterns of (bodily and informational) migration and diffusion along with new group formations
that link collectivity to connectivity and, in the process, make and remake ideas about the relati-
onship between the individual and the community. (Whissel 2010: 109)
Summarily, contra the utopian Chicago School’s understanding of the “great com-
munity” (Baran and Davis 2015: 306), Eli Pariser, in his theorisation of “filter bubbles” ex -
plains that “the era of civic connection [...] dreamed about hasn’t come. Democracy requires
citizens to see things from one another’s point of view, but instead we’re more and more
enclosed in our own bubbles. Democracy requires a reliance on shared facts; instead we’re
being offered parallel but separate universes” (Pariser 2011: 8). But why is this so?
Broadly, “[u]nder such new conditions” as what I have theorised as the network city,
“civil societies shrink and disarticulate because there is no longer continuity between the log-
97 V ol. 3, Nr. 2, July 2025
David Christopher
The Virtual Network City and the
Long-T ail of Social Media Alienation
ic of power-making in the global network and the logic of association and representation in
specific societies and cultures” (Castells 2011: 11). Chin adds that “[e]arly discourse on Inter -
net communities tends to be polarised between the celebratory creation of new communities
… and the lack of obligation these very communities promote (Postman [1993] cited in Chin
2010: 121). Perhaps most importantly, Chin argues that, on the one hand, online “interaction
can provide a way of understanding how individuals imagine themselves as communities; but
on the other, interpersonal interaction can also shed light on how communities fracture as
boundaries are shaped and formed while members negotiate the values, rituals and norms of
their community” (Chin 2010: 124). Chin takes this insight from Lynn Cherny:
Boundaries indicate who is inside and who is outside a community; they distinguish the members
from those they differ from or wish to be seen as different from. These boundaries are usually in
the minds of the members and those excluded from the group [...]. Boundaries are often symbolic,
dependent on abstractions like friendship, rivalry, jealousy, similarity. (Cherny 1999: 254)
And again, with specific reference to the city, Castells reiterates that “[o]ne of the
oldest debates in urban sociology refers to the loss of community as a result of urbanization”
(Castells 2011: 60). In the realm of the online network city, these phenomena are decidedly
borrowed from the material world and amplified in the digital arena.
I theorise a long-tail of social alienation that emerges in tandem with the network city
to understand some of the ways these digital communities have given rise to a very particular
kind of social alienation and homophily-based community insularisation that arises from
responses to the phenomena of social narcissism and idealised virtual identity that social
media tends to generate under the conditions of negativity bias. Within these homophilic
network cities emerge nuanced long-term alienating effects that are in some ways the result
of the excessive social proximity brought on by the social media comprising Marshall Mc-
Luhan’s “global village” . Castells makes mention of McLuhan’s notion of the global village
in a number of instances in the service of articulating network flows. Castells argues that
“unlike the mass media of the McLuhan Galaxy, they have technologically and culturally
embedded properties of interactivity and individualization” (Castells 2010: 385). However,
he is astute to ask, “do these potentialities translate into new patterns of communication?
What are the cultural attributes emerging from the process of electronic interaction?” (Cas-
tells 2010: 385). The questions have broad answers, but in the context of the global village,
Rem Koolhaas’s critique of the material post-modern city is instructive, an arena littered
with what he refers to as “junkspace”: “Junkspace is like being condemned to a perpetual
Jacuzzi with millions of your best friends. […] A fuzzy empire of blur, it fuses high and low,
public and private, straight and bent, bloated and starved to offer a seamless patchwork of
the permanently disjointed” (Koolhaas 2001: 176). In the relentless connection imposed by
social media, this proximity can engender long-term alienating effects.
Under the conditions of the network city, a number of determining phenomena
emerge, the most broadly theorised by Paul Rozin and Edward Poyzman as the “negativity
bias” . “The negativity bias is a cognitive bias that results in adverse events having a more
98 SVETOVI / WORLDS leto 3, št. 2, julij 2025
significant impact on our psychological state than positive events” (Pilat and Krastev 2024).
Alexandra Siegel reports that “[h]ateful users are seventy-one times more likely to retweet
other hateful users and suspended users are eleven times more likely to retweet other sus-
pended users, compared to non-hateful users” (Siegel 2020: 63). In the online realm, “[b]eca-
use of our predisposition to focus on and scrutinize the negative, posts that express anger
or hostility grab our attention and inform our perceptions. By nature, we extrapolate and
then use these negative impressions to cast future judgment” (Pilat and Krastev 2024). This
phenomenon comes into sharp focus with the phenomenon of the “disinhibition effect”
theorised by John Suler. Broadly, Suler explains the ways that the preconscious illusion of
anonymity and/or distance prompts online users to relax their codes of social propriety.
In an increasingly intimate e-mail relationship, people may quickly reveal personal information,
then later regret their self-disclosures – feeling exposed, vulnerable, or shameful. An excessively
rapid, even false intimacy may develop, which later destroys the relationship when one or both
people feel overwhelmed, anxious, or disappointed. (Suler 2004: 321–322)
Suler argues that there can be therapeutically positive results of the disinhibition ef-
fect, but in concert with negativity bias, it is generally understood to manifest undesirable
social consequences.
Furthermore, amongst his three types of identity construction, Castells defines “proj -
ect identity” as occurring “when social actors, on the basis of whichever cultural materials
are available to them, build a new identity that redefines their position in society and, by
so doing, seek the transformation of overall social structure” (Castells 2011: 8). Apropos,
Kaja Silverman offers a psychoanalytically-inflected argument for the specular propensity of
identity construction under the repressed perception of the gaze of the super-ego (Silverman
2013: 133). Under the conditions of late capitalism related to Guy DeBord’s understanding
of the commodified “Society of the Spectacle” , in tandem with the democratic interactive
social media affordances that make up the network city, Silverman’s psychoanalytical phe -
nomenon of “putting oneself into the picture” has reached ostentatious levels of narcissism.
This may be gender-biased based on the more critical social expectations placed on wom -
en, but men are certainly not exempt from it. Indeed, with brief reference to Christopher
Lasch’s seminal argument regarding rising American narcissism under the conditions of late
capitalism and to DeBord’s “Society of the Spectacle” , Castells describes this phenomenon
as a social pathology: “The urge to express one’s identity, and to have it recognized tangibly
by others, is increasingly contagious and has to be recognized as an elemental force even in
the shrunken, apparently homogenizing, high-tech world of the end of the twentieth cen-
tury” (Castells 2011: 28). From this perspective, Castells’ prosocial prognostications for the
phenomenon of “project identity” might be unduly idealistic.
In many cases, people are seeking new identities out of self-commodification and a
culture of spectacular narcissism. Zywica and Danowski theorise “the idealized virtual iden-
tity hypothesis, the tendency for creators of social network site [SNS] profiles to display
idealized characteristics that do not reflect their actual personalities” (Zywica and Danows -
99 V ol. 3, Nr. 2, July 2025
David Christopher
The Virtual Network City and the
Long-T ail of Social Media Alienation
ki 2008: 6). While “Mitja Back and his colleagues tested this hypothesis and discovered it
happens far less often than most people think” (Baran and Davis 2015: 351), the frequency
of occurrence may be masked in their synchronic study. In a longitudinal and experiential
examination, any SNS user will certainly have connections that have behaved as such. “It
is, as Christopher Lasch diagnosed, a culture of narcissism. Faith in ourselves, in a world
of make-believe, is more important than reality. Reality, in fact, is dismissed and shunned
as an impediment to success, a form of negativity” (Hedges 2009: 27). One phenomenon
that strikes me, in particular, is something of an inverted Munchausen syndrome by proxy. I
have a number of young relatives who grew up as social media digital natives and who have
very young children. The stories that some of them share online are often characterised by
the description of the miraculously precocious behaviours and insights of their children.
One telling example is characterised by presenting conversation narratives like a script for a
screenplay. In many cases, these narratives of extraordinary children are highly unlikely, cer-
tainly edited by secondary revision, and in some cases simply developmentally impossible.
Even so, Pablo Barberá argues that especially when a social media connection is deemed a
“friend” or “relative” , the online user is likely to click on, or at least attend to a post even if its
message is unsavoury to the receiver (Barberá 2014: 40–41).
What effects can this ill-motivated click engender? At the risk of potentially alien -
ating the reader with a transcript of a conversation, I am reminded of a joke my son, an
autistic user of online media affordances, once shared with me after seeing it, ironically, on -
line. “Have you heard that there is an app that can reveal racism, misogyny, and narcissism?
It’s called ‘Facebook.’” My son’s autistic mind tends to observe ideologically-charged social
media material with a clinical perspective that leaves little room for emotional responses
to social iniquities – very pragmatic – which brings the bare truth of the “joke” into sharp
relief. The disinhibition effect brings much otherwise masked bigotry and ignorance into
the light. The network city is particularly significant here as the construct beyond network
communities that allows for the possibility of a wider audience than those within smaller
concentric circles of Dunbar’s theory. For the narcissistic performer, there is hope of some
level of wider public purchase. For the narcissistic audience safely endowed with a network
city of other social possibilities with which to replace the performer(s), there is safe space to
disdain and eventually possibly socially reject the alienating performance.
These narcissistic performances take longitudinal time to develop and to disaffect the
observer, a long-tail of social media alienation. Over time, especially in the instances, how-
ever rare, when social media interaction comes to significantly replace physical interactions,
the long-tail alienating effects of narcissistic social media behaviours take their toll. Castells
argues that
[i]n this condition of structural schizophrenia between function and meaning, patterns of social
communication become increasingly under stress. And when communication breaks down, when
it does not exist any longer, even in the form of conflictual communication [...], social groups and
individuals become alienated from each other, and see the other as a stranger, eventually as a
threat. (Castells 2010: 3)
100 SVETOVI / WORLDS leto 3, št. 2, julij 2025
I have a number of social media friends, one couple in particular, who, over the years,
have come to post virtually everything to their social media. There does not seem to be a
thought that comes into their heads, an intimate family evening, or the most banal trip to
the grocery store that does not require a photographic sample, always blatantly artificially
posed, that does not make it into their mutual social media platforms. The need for such
public display could hardly be a better example of Baudrillard’s theorisation of social life
collapsing into the realm of simulacrum. I also note that I frequently get friend suggestions
based on Facebook algorithms following my own friend list. Of late, after many years of
friendship, whenever such a suggestion comes through because the candidate is also friends
with this couple, I have come to recognise an alienated reaction from myself in which I feel
that their relationship to this couple is, in fact, a bad endorsement, and that I have no desire
to generate friendships with people of their social ilk. Under these conditions of friendship
on the precipice, it would take little more than one politically unsavoury post from either
of them for me to finally “unfriend” them. “For John B. Thompson, this mediated interac -
tion, or quasi-interaction as he calls it, establishes a ‘non-reciprocal intimacy’ ‘which does
not involve the kind of reciprocity and mutuality characteristic of face-to-face interaction’”
(Thompson [1995: 219] in Chin 2010: 212). Indeed, these friends of mine are otherwise good
people, old and dear ties, but as I moved away from their part of the world, our friendship
became exclusively online, and the alienating effects of the network city have taken hold.
From all class strata and all other identity factions that Castells delineates, it becomes the
case that the more you expose yourself online, the more you perform a narcissism that alien-
ates, unless it is legitimised by the dubious patina of the new capitalist vocational identity
of “influencer” . But an influencer has no audience unless they are a citizen of a network city.
In the network city, predicated on Dunbar’s concentric circles theories of increas-
ingly weak ties, it is the ability to migrate in and out of friendships that defines it. Castells
argues that while “people resist the process of individualization and social atomization, and
tend to cluster in community organizations that, over time, generate a feeling of belonging,
and ultimately, in many cases, a communal, cultural identity, ” it is also the case that “for
this to happen, a process of social mobilization is necessary. That is, people must engage in
urban movements [...] through which common interests are discovered, and defended, life is
shared somehow, and new meaning may be produced” (Castells 2011: 60). As many theorists
have argued, under the conditions of negativity bias, the “filter bubbles” which may com -
prise the homophilic communities Castells describes, create only the illusion of a friendly
world syndrome (Miller et al. 2021). Castells makes a strong case that identity construction
informs the development of city spaces as well. Within them, “[s]ocial movements tend to
be fragmented, localistic, single-issue oriented, and ephemeral, either retrenched in their
inner worlds, or flaring up for just an instant around a media symbol. In such a world of
uncontrolled, confusing change, people tend to regroup around primary identities: religious,
ethnic, territorial, national” (Castells 2010: 3). Again, taking the example of online fan com -
munities, and citing Bourdieu, Chin states that “[i]n a sense, these fans go on to develop
their own illusio [...], continually generating the boundaries that determine who the insiders
101 V ol. 3, Nr. 2, July 2025
David Christopher
The Virtual Network City and the
Long-T ail of Social Media Alienation
and outsiders of the game are” (Chin 2010: 156). Indeed, as a fully virtual phenomenon, the
network city is the paradigmatic “imagined community” , and the illusion of cultural security
and belonging generates a temerity to disdain. When people participate in their virtual com-
munities as part of a network city, replete with a seemingly endless supply of potential social
contacts, there emerges a fearlessness to discontinue old connections that have become stale
in the real world and then alienating in their virtual long-tail. “The cost, however, is the high
mortality rate of on-line friendships, as an unhappy sentence may be sanctioned by clicking
away the connection – for ever” (Castells 2011: 89) because there are always “plenty of fish
in the sea” of the virtual city.
CONCLUSION
Untethered from geographic limits and from the limits of the broad society theorised by
Castells or the micro-communities that comprise it, the network city opens a space to un-
derstand socially alienating and insularising effects that borrow from the material world but
supersede it in exclusively virtual/digital networks. The slow-rising resentment and disdain
outlined above, and the migratory social behaviours it may engender, is surely not determined
by the network city, but it is the theoretical landscape which makes it feasible. The network
city is the “imagined community” re-imagined with the new conditions arising from the
virtual community, in which the previously imagined shared national identity fostered by
mass media actually brings a more material ontology to the commune, either derived from
real-world relationships complemented online through social media, or developed through
filter bubbles and echo chambers returning only like-minded social connections from the
broader internet arena – a digital homophily. Indeed, in perhaps his most apocalyptic prog-
nostication, Castells indicates that the “communalism” that is characteristic of what I have
defined as the network city is quite doomed, because it is pervaded by narcissistic individ -
ualism (Castells 2011: 64). As such, eventually the network city leads back to the material
world, in which the long-tail of social media alienation can only be ameliorated by face-to-
face physical human interaction.
Certainly these alienating effects do not occur for all, and perhaps not even for most
SNS users, but as a “long-tail” effect, the phenomenon requires longitudinal time-scales to
measure, or even recognise. As Clay Shirky explains:
This is also the shape behind Chris Anderson’s discussion in the long tail; most items offered at
online retailers like iT unes and Amazon don’t sell well, but in aggregate they generate considera-
ble income. The pattern doesn’t apply just to goods, though, but to social interactions as well.
Real-world distributions are only an approximation of this formula, but the imbalance it creates
appears in an astonishing number of places in large social systems. (Shirky 2008: 126)
However, unlike the dystopic vision of E. M. Forster’s short story “The Machine
Stops” (1909), for example, in which individuals have socially evolved past physical inter-
action into a dystopic realm of atomised cells and all communications are electronical-
102 SVETOVI / WORLDS leto 3, št. 2, julij 2025
ly mediated, Castells points out that the digital and the physical social worlds currently
operate in a complementary way rather than a mutually exclusive way, and while a wider
range of social interactions can emerge under the convenience of social media, the pre-ex-
isting alienations from the realm of physical interaction can find their way into the digital
realm and then be exacerbated by the disinhibition effect. As it is theorised here, the net -
work city does not generate so much isolation per se as much as alienation and migration
combined with homophily into a social-digital insularisation, raising issues of atomisa-
tion and segregation in the network city communities characterised by negativity bias and
media narcissism.
Perhaps the lost hope for the internet to introduce a new era of improved global de-
mocratisation lies in understanding its virtual communities in this way. It may be the case
that global cities are no longer attached to a specific country per se, but merely an ideology,
or even just a methodology, a preference for a particular combination of interactive options,
a certain urban digital flavour that suits your fancy (although China and the U .S.A. do still
maintain a media imperialism that keeps those nationalist categories relevant). As Castells
argues, “[i]ndeed, [cultural communes’] strength, and their ability to provide refuge, solace,
certainty, and protection, comes precisely from their communal character, from their collec-
tive responsibility, cancelling individual projects” (Castells 2011: 67). Quantitative measures
of this phenomenon are likely impossible, and just as likely irrelevant. What is important is
the fact that this long-tail of alienation occurs, in whatever quantity, under the specific con -
ditions made possible by the network city. From this point of departure, cultural analyses
arising from a nuanced understanding of the dynamics made possible by the network city
can emerge, offering at least the superficial insight that for a truly progressive network city to
emerge, it will require the significant decommodification and “de-narcissisification” of the
cyber-space in which it occurs.
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POVZETEK
Avtor razpravlja o problemu novih oblik komuniciranja na področju »omrežnega
mesta«. Močno se opira na Castellsovo teorijo o družbi omrežij in se ukvarja s problemi
izolacije, ki jo prinašajo digitalna omrežna mesta. Na podlagi izhodišča, ki se sklicuje
na ideje Castellsa, Jeana Baudrillarda, Berthe Chin in številnih drugih virov s področja
teorije medijev, poskuša teoretizirati digitalno mesto, virtualno urbano organizacijo, kot
način razumevanja družbenih, kapitalističnih in ekoloških posledic izključno digitalne
strani družbe globalnega omrežja. »Omrežno mesto« opredeljuje kot del omrežja tako
znotraj kot zunaj njegovih meja. In tako kot so dinamike moči ali razredne hierarhije
104 SVETOVI / WORLDS leto 3, št. 2, julij 2025
progaste ali rizomatične v odnosih tako v kot med dejanskimi, fizičnimi mesti, so takšne
tudi na spletu.
T eoretično izhodišče za obravnavo te preobrazbe je odnos med mesti, kot jih pozna-
mo, kot geografskimi entitetami, in novimi virtualnimi mesti, zlasti z vidika problematike
strukturiranja in prestrukturiranja skupnosti in s tem povezanih identitet. Prehod od pros-
torske k digitalni bližini pa kot posledico prinaša tudi nove vrsto izolacije. Prostorski izrazi,
s katerimi opisujemo dele mest, kot so »predmestje«, »industrijsko okrožje« ali »mestno
središče«, imajo svoje ustreznice v omrežnih, virtualnih mestih. Na ta način spreminjajo
naše razumevanje migracij, ki so zdaj veliko hitrejše in pogojene z drugačni razlogi. Posle-
dično nastanejo tudi nove oblike izolacije in odtujenosti, ki jih najdemo pri učinkih, ki so že
teoretizirani v literaturi o kulturi omrežij.
Na splošno se pod pogoji tega, kar se teoretizira kot omrežno mesto, »civilne druž-
be skrčijo in razčlenijo, saj ni več kontinuitete med logiko ustvarjanja moči v globalnem
omrežju ter logiko združevanja in predstavljanja v specifičnih družbah in kulturah« (Cas -
tells 2011: 11). Prispevek teoretizira dolgi rep družbene odtujenosti, ki se pojavi skupaj z
omrežnim mestom, da bi razjasnil, kako te digitalne skupnosti povzročajo zelo posebno
vrsto družbene odtujenosti in izolacije, ki temelji na homofiliji. Le-ta pa izhaja iz odzivov
na družbeni narcizem in idealizirane virtualne identitete, ki sta posledici negativne pristran-
skosti družbenih medijev.