ABSTRACT
For a certain group of philosophers and theologians, the social media of the Internet offers the promise of a new kind of community. The open access, ever-evolving framework and vast discursive networks ostensibly providing a new space for liberated, postmodern persons to enact a communal life contra the coercive political arrangements of modernity. But does the cyber-city operate beyond the tendrils of the old authorities, or is it merely an extension of the walls and power structures it seeks to overcome? This chapter suggests, via the work of Gillian Rose and Graham Ward, that social media has not shed the old powers of modernity to enact a new politics; instead, it has merely buried these structures beneath spectacle of ‘virtual’ reality.
