Three Stages of Media Evolution: From Lacanian Orders to AI Communication

All right, let’s dive into something that’s shaping our world every single day. Social media. We’re going to pull back the curtain on its evolution. From your very first Facebook post all the way to the AI stuff that’s now all over your feed. Turns out there’s a pattern, a hidden structure to it all. And we’re going to break it down.

You’ve probably felt this, right? It’s not just that the buttons are in different places. Every one of these platforms has its own vibe, its own personality, and that vibe actually changes how we behave, who we present ourselves to be. And here’s the kicker, it’s not random. Not even close. There’s actually a deep psychological logic that’s been driving this whole thing, pushing these platforms from one phase to the next. And that’s exactly what we’re here to do. We’re going to unpack this hidden framework that, believe it or not, organizes your entire online life. I promise by the time we’re done, you are going to see your social media feed in a totally new way.

Okay, so to really get this, we need a toolkit. We’re going to borrow three powerful ideas from this psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan. Don’t worry, it’s simple. These three concepts, they are the key to unlocking absolutely everything that follows.

First up is what he called the imaginary. Just think of it as the mirror. It’s all about images, identity, and the way we see ourselves. You know, it’s that perfect profile picture, the filtered vacation shot. It’s the idealized version of you that you want the world to see.

Next, we have the symbolic. Let’s call this the rule book. This is the world of language, of laws, of structures, things like your job title, your relationship status, the college you went to, all those labels we use, they’re all part of the symbolic order that structures our society.

And finally, we get to the tricky one, the real. Think of this as the glitch. The real is everything that just doesn’t fit into the other two boxes. It’s the stuff you can’t capture in a pretty picture or explain with neat labels. It’s the messy stuff, the accident, the shock that suddenly breaks through our tidy little reality.

So, let’s recap real quick. We’ve got the imaginary, which is the mirror, the symbolic, which is the rule book, and the real, that’s the glitch. Got it? The mirror, the rule book, the glitch. Remember those because now we’re going to see how the entire history of social media maps onto them perfectly.

Let’s rewind to stage one. This is the classical era of social media. Think back to the 2010s. The big three platforms popped up. And what’s wild is that each one basically cornered the market on one of these three orders. And just look at how cleanly this works. Instagram was our digital mirror, the home of the imaginary, right? Facebook became the ultimate rulebook structuring our lives in the symbolic. And Twitter, well, Twitter was the glitch, the chaotic space where the real kept breaking through.

I mean, think about it. Instagram was all about crafting that flawless curated you. But Facebook, it wasn’t just about a pretty picture. It was about defining yourself with these symbolic statements: in a relationship with or works at. These were formal structured declarations. And then you had Twitter, where that character limit forced everything into the gaps. It was all about the subtext, the irony, the crazy stuff that just erupted between the lines.

But of course, things didn’t stay that way. And then bam, stage two, video takes over. The old static world of text and photos gets blown up by this dynamic, performative, algorithm-driven new reality. The three orders, they didn’t go away. They just got reshuffled onto a whole new set of platforms.

So Instagram, it managed to hang on to the imaginary, but it had to evolve, right? It became more about performance with Stories and Reels, but the real shakeup was in the symbolic and the real. YouTube rose up as the new rule book, and this crazy new app, TikTok, became the undisputed king of the glitch.

Check out this shift in the symbolic order. It’s fascinating. On old school Facebook, your identity came from what you declared: I am this. But on YouTube, your identity, your whole authority comes from what you consistently produce. It’s not enough to just say you’re a film critic. You got to prove it week after week with videos, podcasts, series. It’s a huge shift from just declaring who you are to constantly producing it.

And the evolution of the real is just as wild. On Twitter, the real was linguistic. It was found in the spaces between the words. But on TikTok, it’s totally different. The real is physical. It’s performative. It’s that awkward dance move, that accidental slip up, the moment the performance glitches and you suddenly see something authentic. There’s actually a great term for this, parapraxic realism. Now, a parapraxis is basically a Freudian slip. You know, an error that accidentally reveals a hidden truth. And that’s the secret sauce of TikTok’s real. The entire platform is built on these happy accidents. The viral moments aren’t born from perfection. They’re born from those little glitches and spontaneous failures.

And that brings us right up to the present day, stage three, the AI revolution. And let me tell you, this isn’t just another small step. This is a fundamental break from everything that came before. Now the machines aren’t just the platform. They are the creators. And this is where it starts to feel a little sci-fi. Our three orders, the mirror, the rulebook, and the glitch, are now being taken over by AI. DALL-E and its cousins are hijacking the imaginary. ChatGPT is automating the symbolic and these new AI music generators like Suno, they’re creating a bizarre new form of the real.

The key thing to get here is that this is a complete rupture. This is a break from a human-centered world. DALL-E can spit out a billion images that have zero connection to a real person’s life or identity. ChatGPT can write a flawless essay that has no actual human thought or intention behind it. And Suno can create music that sounds emotional but isn’t tied to any human feeling at all.

So, how does AI music fit in? For this, there’s one last cool concept, lang. It’s a fancy word for the sounds a baby makes before it learns language. You know, all the cooing and babbling. It has rhythm. It has tone, but it doesn’t have meaning yet. And that’s exactly what AI music models are doing. They’re generating the sound of human emotion without any actual human being there.

So, we’ve gone on this huge journey, right? From humans curating their lives to algorithms shaping our performances and now to machines generating culture itself. We’ve reached this incredible tipping point and we’ve got to ask, where in the world do we go from here?

This right here is the big climax. The theory is that we are now entering a post symbolic world. It’s an era where human intention is no longer the main force behind the culture we consume. The images, the words, the music, it’s all being generated more and more without us. Our job is shifting from creator to, well, to just a curator trying to find something meaningful in an endless ocean of AI content.

And that leaves us with this massive unavoidable question. What happens to meaning? What happens to the value of art, of language, of identity when the very things that made them special, human effort, human struggle, human creativity, can just be reproduced by an algorithm infinitely and instantly? That’s the challenge of this new world, and we are only just beginning to figure it out.