This ain’t a Tweet, it's a Goddamn Arms Race!

: This ain’t a Tweet, it's a Goddamn Arms Race! An Exploration of Contemporary Culture Wars and The Algorithmic Harms of Social Media

Abstract

This definitely is not your standard PhD. There are no neat hypotheses, no sterile third-person detachment, and no apology for the profanity that occasionally slips through the cracks. This is an exploration of social media, culture wars, and the algorithmic damage done to us all. What began as an ethnographic attempt to understand online extremism mutated, through lockdowns, breakdowns, and several pints of self-doubt, into an autoethnographic odyssey through the digital trenches of Twitter/X. At its core, this thesis asks what happens when
debate becomes performance, when identity becomes product, and when algorithms decide what matters.
Using found poetry constructed from a detritus of tweets and digital venom, this thesis dissects how social media has become both an online bazaar and e-coliseum: where selfhood, ideology, and outrage are mined for clicks. A cacophony of pixelated voices screaming at my muses, Dylan Mulvaney, J.K. Rowling, Andrew Tate, and Jo Phoenix, became art-as-analysis.
However, these are not detached analyses of others’ behaviour; they are mirrors held up to my own. The boundary between the researcher and the researched collapsed somewhere around my fifth existential crisis. This is sociology written in scars and screenshots; it is Gonzo academia. Beneath the chaos, I trace the origins of social media as a digital contagion and propose a typology of harms that mark the erosion of our humanity in the pursuit of engagement—
Datafication (i) Algorithmic Extraction and (ii) Synthetic Espionage; Algorithmic
Governance Fire Walls and (ii) Behavioural Coding; Operational (i) Interpersonal
Alienation and (ii) Algorithmicification; Existential (i) Algorithmic Anomie and (ii)
Spectral Liminality.
This is also a love letter and a middle finger to academia. It is a plea for plain English, for working-class voices, for scholars who swear, cry, and dare to make meaning without hiding behind institutional jargon. It is a reminder that not every researcher wants to be a brand. Some of us want to tell the truth about ourselves, about society, and about the machines we have built that now tell us who we are.

Date of Award	3 Mar 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Staffordshire University