GALLERY LXXXII
The Screen and the Square
Every communication technology has been said to remake American politics, and each time the effect was real but smaller and stranger than predicted. The interesting question is what a medium makes CHEAP.
ON THE FLOOR
Charles Horton Cooley
Theorist designate - flagged from the theory registry (#8494)
“You learned who you are by watching what other people reflected back at you. The mirror, it turns out, was people all along.”
ON THE FLOOR
Edward Soja
Theorist designate - flagged from the theory registry (#8494)
“Space is not the stage the story happens on - it is one of the actors. Ask WHERE, and half the mystery answers itself.”
ON THE FLOOR
George Herbert Mead
Theorist designate - flagged from the theory registry (#8494)
“The self is a conversation: the I speaking, the Me listening with everyone else's ears. You rehearse society every time you think.”
AM6-061 · The Screen and the Square — Open the drawer
A contemporary smartphone showing a typical social media platform interface, representative of the primary communication device through which most Americans now encounter news, political speech, and coordination tools in the 2020s.
AM6-062 · The Screen and the Square — What is this thing?
A small blue checkmark displayed next to usernames on the social media platform Twitter, certifying account authenticity. Introduced in 2006, it became a symbol of status, access, and gatekeeping power in networked communication.
AM6-063 · The Screen and the Square — Read the source
The text of Franklin D. Roosevelt's first radio address to the nation, explaining the banking crisis to millions simultaneously—a moment when one voice could reach a mass audience at near-zero marginal cost.
AM6-064 · The Screen and the Square — Map it / time it
The iconic error graphic displayed when Twitter's servers overloaded during early growth, symbolizing the infrastructure limits of real-time mass coordination and the spatial/temporal fragility of networked communication.
AM6-065 · The Screen and the Square — Two sources disagree
Transcript of the first televised U.S. presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, September 26, 1960, Chicago. Radio listeners and television viewers reported opposite impressions of the same event.
AM6-066 · The Screen and the Square — State the claim
A contemporary smartphone showing simultaneous Twitter and TikTok feeds from a single news event, illustrating how networked platforms distribute political information faster but fragment consensus about what happened.
AM6-067 · The Screen and the Square — Take the other side
Real-time social media posts from the Capitol riot showing how networked communication enabled mass coordination, physical assembly, and live documentation at a speed and scale previous technologies could not match.
AM6-068 · The Screen and the Square — Weigh it
A representative digital record from the first hours of coordinated protest documentation via social media during the Ferguson uprising, showing how networked platforms enabled real-time witness testimony and rapid information distribution outside traditional news cycles.
AM6-069 · The Screen and the Square — Build the answer
Documentary photograph of Zuccotti Park occupation showing hand-drawn signs, tents, and assembled crowd, October 2011. Captures material infrastructure of leaderless coordination enabled by networked communication and demonstrates what became cheap to organize.
AM6-070 · The Screen and the Square — For the file
A digital interface showing Twitter's paid verification system ($8/month for blue checkmark), exemplifying how networked platforms made identity-certification cheap to distribute but expensive to trust.
AM6-071 · The Screen and the Square — Go and look
A smartphone displaying a live video feed from a street demonstration, showing how networked devices make real-time documentation and coordination cheap enough for any participant to perform.
AM6-072 · The Screen and the Square — Now, today
A representative contemporary smartphone showing a live video stream of a street protest, capturing how networked devices simultaneously document, broadcast, and coordinate political action in real time to distributed audiences.
AM6-073 · The Screen and the Square — Teach it back
A representative printout of a social media platform's terms of service from the 2010s, illustrating the legal architecture that made user-generated content and algorithmic distribution cheap to produce and distribute at scale.
AM6-074 · The Screen and the Square — The other place
A tabletop or console AM radio typical of Depression-era and postwar American farmsteads, representing how broadcast technology reached dispersed populations and created new forms of political simultaneity across regions with vastly different media infrastructure.
AM6-075 · The Screen and the Square — One object, close
A contemporary smartphone displaying an active social media feed, representative of the device that made mass coordination, real-time publishing, and algorithmic distribution cheap enough for any user to access instantly.
From the gallery’s own wall — “AM6-061 · The Screen and the Square — Open the drawer”.
🎧 A moment to consider
What will you carry out of this room?