Symbols and Spatiality of Social Media: Re-constructing the Digital Public Realm

Abstract

This project centers around the making of the digital public realm and its social impact. In the first half, I aim to offer a diagnosis of today's problematic online environment from an architectural and urbanistic point of view. In the second half, I will present two new symbols that have the potential to better the online conversational structure.

The research part includes the analysis of the origins, evolutions (or corruptions), and the relational structures of four selected social media symbols: 1) hyperlink, 2) at sign, 3) following, 4) hashtag. From an urban standpoint, this project will examine the digital public realm within the context of global urbanization, and by re-visiting and re-interpreting terms like “echo chambers” and “privacy crisis,” to understand why its current structure, one that rests upon the logic of economics, has turned the internet into an insatiable and formless network that is incapable of conditioning effective political communications. Overall, this project will take architecture and urbanism as the design and research methodology, political philosophy as the conceptual framework, and media studies as the state of field.