Thanks largely to the spread of smart scrollable devices in the last fifteen years, a certain concept of public participation—what is now known in the managerial vernacular as ‘engagement’—is common to events of this sort, and to the way they are framed by the media. The individual is not conceived in the same way as in the liberal philosophical tradition—as an autonomous agent, possessed of reason and interests—or in the psychoanalytic tradition, as shaped perhaps unconsciously by past conflicts and injuries. Instead, each of us (celebrities included) becomes a junction box in a vast, complex network, receiving, processing and emitting information in a semi-automatic fashion, and in real time. Information and emotions bounce between these junctions, mutating as they travel, as instantiated in the memes and jokes that spread virally via social media platforms. In this model, each individual reaction is one more item of information thrown back into the network, in search of counter-reactions.

William Davies, “The Reaction Economy”