I am surprised to find myself coming back to this for making sense of the role of social media in the lifeworld, through the gateway drug of thinking about algorithmic isomorphism plays out in everyday life. I must say I wasn’t expecting that my thought might take a Habermasian turn and I feel a bit conflicted about it:
It is only with this that the conditions for a colonization of the lifeworld are met. When stripped of their ideological veils, the imperatives of autonomous subsystems make their way into the lifeworld from the outside—like colonial masters coming into a tribal society—and force a process of assimilation upon it. The diffused perspectives of the local culture cannot be sufficiently coordinated to permit the play of the metropolis and the world market to be grasped from the periphery.
Thus, the theory of late-capitalist reification, reformulated in terms of system and lifeworld, has to be supplemented by an analysis of cultural modernity, which replaces the now superseded theory of consciousness. Rather than serving a critique of ideology, this analysis would have to explain the cultural impoverishment and fragmentation of everyday consciousness. Rather than hunting after the scattered traces of revolution
https://teddykw2.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/jurgen-habermas-the-theory-of-communicative-action-volume-2.pdf
Mark Carrigan 