Although this scene incorporates many of the countercultural, radical presuppositions of activist movements—that media consolidation limits diversity of opinions, that government should be transparent, that corporations should be responsible to their communities and customers, and so forth—it does so in a way that prioritizes personal reforms over structural change. The famous slogan of the second-wave feminist movement, “the personal is political,” emphasized that gender roles and discrimination played out in micro-interactions and personal choices, what Michel Foucault calls “capillaries of power.” When applied to the inward focus and self-monitoring encouraged by social media, the personal is antithetical to the type of large-scale structural change that these activist groups originally advocated.

Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, loc. 724