Rosaline Dou
Reactor not Creator
Written in the mid-1940s during the rapid expansion of mass media, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer developed their critique of the “culture industry” in Dialectic of Enlightenment. The culture industry refers to the standardized production of culture as commodities that manipulate mass society into a state of “resignation,” leading to acceptance without resistance, which “debars [people] from thinking”. Within this system, leisure no longer functions as the opposite of labor, but rather “the prolongation of work.” Mass media, including film, radio, popular music, magazine, and television at the time, though designed to help workers recover from exhaustion, offers only “an escape from bad reality,” a pleasure meant to forget exhaustion not overcome it. It simulates emotion so that we feel we are feeling; it generates conversation so that we think we are thinking. Therefore, post-work hours are no longer free but occupied, filled enough to soothe, too full to think. Rather than liberating workers from domination at work, the culture industry trains them to endure it, promising pleasure while binding them in the reality they seek to forget.
Today, the logic of the culture industry persists but mutates. As new media scholar Wendy Hui Kyong Chun observes in Updating to Remain the Same, the distinction now lies between “the empowered user and the couch potato.” Evolved from Adorno and Horkheimer’s time, contemporary digital culture provides Internet users with ways to participate on platforms through reactions, such as liking, sharing, reposting, and commenting. What once was a passive viewer, slumped on the couch watching soap operas all day, has transformed. The screen no longer asks only to be watched, but to be touched, responded to, and continuously fed data. Reaction supplies a sense of participation, disguising passivity as activity, and coating that activity with a feeling of creativity and generativity.
Upon entering the interface of social media, I step directly into a circuit of reaction. Whatever choice I make, whether I start scrolling, liking, commenting, visiting profiles, reposting, following, sharing, recommending, or even exiting, constitutes a reaction in itself. Political and sociological theorist William Davies framed reaction as “feedback,” a “return path” that conveys information about performance and signals whether adjustment is required. Clicking “like” or “follow” indicates acknowledgement or agreement, signaling positive feedback that affirms “no behavioural change [is] required.” Negative feedback, such as unfollowing or commenting in disagreement, signals that “behavioural change [is ]required.” Even nonaction, non-response functions as negative feedback, remaining legible to the platform. As Chun emphasizes, “there is no ‘silence of the masses’ in new media.” Whether I choose to engage or withdraw, no gesture escapes the circuit of reactivity. Entering the platform itself triggers an automatic response mechanism. Thus, reaction is a dominant mode of participation on social media platforms, where being is reacting.
The platform’s design ensures this inevitability. Every interface function formats interaction as a reaction. In particular, “reposting” emerges as a central operation within the reaction economy. The repost function can be traced back to “retweet” on Twitter (now X), a microblogging and social networking service. Early Twitter users manually retweeted by copying and pasting a tweet into a new compose window, adding “RT” and the original author’s handle. Researchers danah boyd, Scott Golder, and Gilad Lotan paralleled retweeting to email forwarding: users share messages originally written by others, much like forwarding an email. Similar to email chain letters, retweets also circulate content that has already been retweeted. Observing this behavior, Twitter hired developer Chris Wetherell to build it into the platform. In November 2009, the retweet button was launched. Instead of copying and pasting, users could now repost content with a single click, automatically preserving the original image and author attribution. In an interview with BuzzFeed News, Wetherell noted that while the retweet button spreads information more efficiently, it also reduces the friction that manual retweeting once demanded—the buffering time that compelled users to at least “look at what they shared,” to “think about it,” to deliberate during the gap created by copying and pasting.
Within days of its publication on July 23, 2019, the BuzzFeed News reporting was picked up by major news outlets, including BBC News, CBC News, Futurism, The Hill, New York Post, and The Times.,,,,, These outlets summarized and quoted Wetherell’s interview, characterizing the retweet button as a “loaded weapon” that accelerates the spread of false information. Many also supplemented the original reporting with additional context to reinforce the harmful media environment created by social platforms. BBC News, for example, quoted Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey admitting that the platform incentivizes posting outrage in the moment; The Times cited industry-wide developer regrets, such as Aza Raskin’s reflection on “infinite scroll” and its capacity to keep people endlessly online., These outlets attributed their reporting to the source by stating “in an interview with BuzzFeed” and linking to the original story. The architecture of this news pickup shares that of retweeting. The attribution of the original news source is similar to tagging an original tweet author. The follow-up coverage recirculates in a way that resembles retweeting a post. As media researchers suggest, retweeting is not just about “get[ting] messages out to new audiences,” but also to “validate and engage with others.” Pickup reporting functions similarly. The “forwarding” of coverage establishes newsworthiness and confers legitimacy. All these similarities make journalistic pickup a form of proto-retweeting.
But what happens when this logic is transferred from media institutions to digital platforms through a frictionless button? As the unit of transmission becomes smaller, so too does the authority of the validator, from an entire media outlet to an individual user. What differentiates the retweet from its predecessor is not only scale, but more importantly, the simplicity of the gesture. A media outlet’s decision to republish a story involves reading, fact-checking, evaluating newsworthiness, processing information, framing the message, drafting the coverage, and passing through rounds of editorial review. In contrast, the retweet button simplifies this entire process into a single click, detaching redistribution from interpretation. Individual users bear far less responsibility for resharing content and therefore face little obligation to fact-check, process, or even fully read what they share. When resonance or dissonance can be expressed as easily as pressing a button, response is reduced to its most immediate form, or merely the feeling itself. Processing may come later, or not at all. I am not claiming that this always occurs, but that the design of the button allows, permits, and facilitates acting (retweeting) first and thinking later.
Concerns about diminished friction become clearer in different statistics related to retweets. In 2013, marketing analyst Dan Zarrella examined 2.7 million tweets with links and found that 14.64% of retweeted links received no clicks, while 16.12% garnered more retweets than clicks. These figures suggest that many users share links without ever reading them, instead responding to fragments that may capture their attention. A 2018 study by three MIT scholars tracked over 126,000 stories that were tweeted more than 4.5 million times by about three million people from 2006 to 2017. The study found that false news stories were 70% more likely to be retweeted than true ones. While truthful stories rarely reached 1,000 retweets, the top 1% false stories reached as many as 100,000. False news spreads further, faster, and deeper, driven by the novelty it offers compared to factual reporting. This striking data reinforces how easily users retweet without prior evaluation, let alone thinking. Retweeting thus compresses the temporal and cognitive space between reception and response, undermining the deliberation in favor of immediate reactions. In this way, it participates in the same logic of recirculation as others putting effort and consideration into doing so—doing without actually doing.
Reactions such as likes, comments, retweets, and follows frame a passive mode of engagement as activity. Internet users often interact with content through reaction buttons, producing a sense of involvement. When users react, the original material and the aggregated user responses together form a constantly updating display that each new user encounters upon interaction. The visibility of likes, comments, shares, and reposts as integral components of the content display embeds participation within the work. Reactions thus enable users to participate in the original content, without assuming the role of content creator or engaging in content creation.
This structure of reaction resembles the logic of the culture industry. As in mass consumption, individuals are invited to choose from existing options rather than determine what those options are. These reactions operate like commodities: differentiated, selectable, and ready-made. Users become option-choosers, not producers of alternatives, or someone who imagines what other possibilities might be available. Although choice means freedom, in this case, it is actually limited by predetermined options. As Davies observes, reaction buttons are a “ubiquitous feature of the kinds of ‘control.’” When pressing a button, users are presented with a set of preset options—like or dislike, follow or unfollow, comment, share, repost, or exit—each framed as an act of decision-making. The interface thus grants a perceived freedom to choose and to act. Yet, this freedom is not generative but reactive. What distinguishes digital culture from earlier forms of consumption is not the removal of constraints, but its transformation. Users are no longer just passive recipients; they feel as if they are doing something. The ability to react produces a sense of activity, even as the range of possible actions remains strictly confined.
A typical culture industry consumer, such as a television watcher, also reacts. In response to television content, they may laugh, cry, or feel anger or surprise. Yet these reactions remain external to the television network. Television content and viewer reaction are divided by the screen: one takes place at the site of production and broadcast, while the other occurs within the physical space of television watching. In other words, the viewer’s reaction does not formally participate in or engage with the television’s content. These reactions are exclusive to the viewer themselves. On digital platforms, by contrast, the distance between content creators and reactors is diminished; both are users of the same platform. Viewers are designated spaces to display their reactions. As Chun notes, “every interaction is made to leave a trace.” Likes, retweets, shares, comments, downloads, and views leave traces in the form of quantifiable counts and visible listings. Unlike reactions to television, which remain private, digital reactions are recorded and publicly displayed. Through this incorporation into the platform’s networked system, the activity of reacting is rendered comparable to the activity of creating. Although reactors do not produce the content itself, their reactions enter the same circuits of visibility, circulation, and valuation. As a result, the viewer-as-reactor comes to feel like a participant in the work, and in some cases, like something closer to a co-producer.
With this sense of activity comes an illusion of control. To react feels like acting, and because acting is not nothing, users experience themselves as active despite remaining viewers. The constant availability of reaction, at any moment to anything, serves as proof of user agency. The right to speak and express enacts a democratic fantasy in which users appear empowered through the infrastructure of reaction. As Chun argues, networked systems do not primarily command behavior but produce agency through habit and prediction. Rather than commanding behavior, these systems present users with options whose likelihood has already been statistically determined, making actions feel voluntary and personal. Freedom emerges not as the opposite of control but as one of its effects. This dynamic becomes especially visible in moments of crisis, when platforms solicit reaction by “offering the experience of something like responsibility.” Users come to feel responsible for reacting when encountering content, repeatedly engaging through expressive yet preformatted gestures. Such repetitive habits eliminate friction. When actions feel natural, they feel chosen.
Reactions channel action, not open it. Although reactions can accumulate further reactions, such as comments receiving likes and replies, they do not transform the content itself. Instead, reaction inserts the user into an existing flow. By reacting, users feel “I am part of the conversation,” because their gesture is registered. The platform confirms this sense of mattering not just by acknowledging that a reaction has been received, but by validating it through its counting system. One post, one like, one comment, one repost, and one share all count as one. Thus, the numerical unit of one equates all gestures on the platform, whether creating or reacting. Content, reactions to content, and reactions to reactions are commensurable through the same unit of conversion to visibility. Users thus perceive value not only because they see themselves being counted, but because the system assigns equal worth to all actions through a unified recording mechanism.
This conversion of reaction into value generates a powerful illusion: the sense that one is contributing, producing, even creating. Reaction thus acquires a feeling of generativity. I call this sense of coating doing as if creating pseudo-creativity. Reactors feel that something has been done simply because something has been expressed. Yet nothing, in fact, begins. Despite the doing of reaction, reactors remain viewers of the content, not creators of the source; reactors of the source, not the sources of reaction. What is felt as creativity is only the affective residue of value capture: doing coated as creating.
Crucially, the repost is displayed on the user’s profile in parallel with their original posts and tagged content. Structurally, the repost page shares the same architecture as a post page: a scrollable grid, three images per line, a standardized 4:5 aspect ratio, and a cover image leading to a detailed view. By placing reposts alongside original posts, the interface presents them as part of the user’s body of work, as if a collection, rather than as a reaction. Sharing the same infrastructural form as authored content, reposting creates a false sense of authorship, even while being promoted in Instagram’s feature announcement as a mechanism that “explicitly recognizes the original creator.”
Instagram has repeatedly claimed that its recent changes are designed “to reward original creators,” as stated by the platform’s head, Adam Mosseri, in an interview with media strategist Brock Johnson. The platform has also announced new algorithmic measures intended to elevate originality, including identifying original content, replacing duplicated posts in recommendations, and labeling copied content with links to its source. Yet in practice, the algorithm appears to reward circulation more than origination.
Digital marketer Josh Ryan demonstrated this contradiction in a video analyzing Instagram’s algorithm. He compared the performance of an original video he posted on March 27, 2025, which received 183,000 views and 8,055 likes, with a copied version of the same video reposted by another account two days later. The copied version accumulated 977,000 views and 25,000 likes, over five times the reach and three times the engagement. Ryan found similar results when he himself copied and reshared his own content: the repost consistently outperformed the original. While this is only one example, it illustrates a broader pattern in which the platform’s declared commitment to originality conflicts with its actual incentive structure. Circulation travels further than creation, thereby motivating reactions such as reposting.
The platform does not merely permit this behavior; it actively incentivizes it. According to Instagram’s updated algorithm, reposts rank as the second most influential factor in increasing reach, surpassed only by shares and outranking likes, comments, saves, and watch time. Creators are thus encouraged to repost and prompt others to repost their content in order to gain visibility. At the level of interface design, this prioritization becomes even more explicit in Instagram’s recent layout changes. Earlier versions of Instagram placed the post button at the center of the primary navigation bar, making creation the most accessible and visually prominent action. In the current layout, the posting feature has been moved to the top left corner, where the Instagram logo was previously located. The change makes posting less visible, less central, and less intuitive to access. The navigation bar now foregrounds Home, Reels, Shares, Search, and Profile. By design, creation (or posting) is no longer the default gesture; circulation is.
Despite claims to “empower creators,” these algorithmic and architectural shifts increasingly position users as vectors of content. Users are encouraged to recirculate, not originate; to amplify, not initiate. As users take on the role of circulators, they become a form of free labor, driven by algorithmic incentives and supported by platform design, while also providing the attention, time, and engagement needed to keep the platform alive. As theorist Tiziana Terranova describes in Network Culture, users voluntarily perform the immaterial labor that sustains digital media through “the cumulative hours of accessing the site.”
In this sense, users resemble workers on an assembly line. Content moves through a manufacturing sequence, passing from one workstation to the next, accumulating value through repeated handling. Each user functions as a node in the circulation process, forwarding content downstream without seeing the final product, or even knowing what it is. What, then, are users actually producing? What are they working toward? Within this operational flow, users participate without controlling the process or its outcomes. They may sense that something is being done, yet remain unaware of what that doing ultimately means.
Within the reaction economy, pseudo-creativity becomes the affective mechanism that sustains this labor. Users are given the feeling of creation without its agency, the sensation of contribution without authorship. The question is not whether users are aware of this condition, but whether exhaustion, habit, and the constant demand to react make exit increasingly difficult. Are we becoming reactionary not only in behavior but in structure, so continuously engaged in responding that initiation itself feels unreachable? Or does the feeling of having done enough, produced by pseudo-creativity, suffice to keep the assembly line moving?
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