r/CriticalTheory • u/seva2 • 7h ago
How to understand the meaninglessness of gen-z media culture?
Gen-z (social) media culture and humor seems to be shaped by increasingly meaningless short-form content, brainrot memes and desensitization to violence (kirkification). It almost seems like we're going through a generational cultural psychosis shaped by algorithms, which are categorically preventing the formation of significant cultural movements with constant streams of meaningless noise. Nothing seems to be real anymore. Could the disintegration of cultural symbols be theorized as the still continuing rise of postmodernity, where the search for stable identities and meanings seems to be a futile pursuit operating in a system of signs which solely refer to each other?