Global balkanization still represents some sort of Jaspersian unity of humankind—but along odd identarian lines that may or may not reflect national or cultural structures. Digital tribes draw their own borders. Digital anthropology becomes the anthropology of niches.

The logic of the Laws of Media is inexorable. The media economy rewarded intensities, offering people low-cost expression, thus increasing noise and agitation. Reaching its extremes, engagement reversed into enragement, and now enragement is reversing into avoidance.

The globalization of empathic involvement-turned-engagement refuels conflicts. For warring sides, global reaction becomes part of warfare.

Sharing isn’t just about content—it’s about affective charge. A meme, tweet, or post that “feels” urgent, funny, or enraging moves faster.

The main genre feature of reality TV—“unscripted but staged”—could serve as a motto for all social media platforms, especially image-based ones like Instagram and TikTok. “Unscripted but staged” has become the essence of performative living on display—an effect of digital media.

Feelings represent intimate, inward experience, while intensities are meant to be shared with others for emotional synchronization—tribal resonance. Feelings resist display; intensities are display.

Fredric Jameson developed[142] the notion of “intensities” to describe the shift from rational reasoning and deep emotions to more immediate, superficial, fleeting, intense experiences. Intensities represent projected emotions—the “outward dramatization of inward feeling.” In the society of the spectacle, experience is mediated by imagery,

Electric amplification of sound brought exactly this affordance—intensified display. Electronic media created show business and amplified performative behavior, increasing the noise produced by humans. With electricity, loudness eventually overpowered quietness.

Digital carnival is an endless performance of human extremes—emotions, ambitions, identities. In pursuit of affirmation, we craft symbolic extensions of self—digital masks—and replay ourselves in variations, again and again. Digital media carnivalize identity.