The unbearable lightness of online social networks and the hyperlocal

Abstract

Social media platforms and the creation and circulation of content that these platforms facilitate are the subject of polarised views. Early claims for the renewed opportunities for citizen empowerment, democratic participation and the emergence of a networked public sphere have been gradually replaced with concerns and media crises around fake news, algorithms of maths destruction, data misappropriation, echo chambers and the failures of the attention economy. This paper levers on Couldry and Hepp’s (2017) treatise on the mediated construction of reality within the construct of hyperlocal culture, media and society. It examines the reflexive relationship between institutional and private media and social media outlets, and the communicative constructive of the social and reflects on the attributes and challenges of media hybridisation in Malta. It concludes with a hypothesis on media ambivalence, whereby the possibilities of a new media ecosystem with the potential to be deployed for the public good appears to be as much dependent on the affordances of disintermediation as it is on a micro-surveillance culture and long-standing constructs of political and media hegemony.