It's the near future, humanity has discovered a new element in the asteroid field that allows faster than light travel and communication through a brute force methods that's largely handwaved away at the moment.
The governments of the world decide that if humanity is to avoid simply bringing its existing conflicts into space that human colonies should be kept small, highly specific, and widely spaced.
This leads to the founding of thousands of small colonies on hundreds of planets, with each colony consisting only of like minded people, on the basis that segregation is the best way to prevent conflict (if you think exactly like your neighbors you will be less likely to go to war with them). Essentially they're themed colonies like in a children's cartoon. Space China Town, Space Little Italy, Space MIT, Space Wild West. And so on.
Colonies are essentially built by converting colony ships into cities or towns. So colonies advanced technology but absolutely no infrastructure beyond their immediate boundaries.
Almost all communication is done wirelessly as there are no landlines. It's possible for one person in a particular colony to livestream their sensations to an audience in real time. Sight, sound, smell touch. It's almost impossible to tell that you aren't experiencing these things yourself. But only within the bounds of that colony's wireless network.
To communicate with another colony on the same planet the data would need to be sent via satellite link.
Satellite data uplinks are tightly controlled due to limited bandwidth. So non-essential transmissions are often downgraded or compressed before transmission, and are transmitted at scheduled intervals rather than in real time. So someone in another colony might only get video and audio data from the above transmission. Even basic text and picture information may have a time delay on it. So it might take an hour for a blog post to become available in another colony on the same planet.
The problem is even worse with colonies on planets in the same solar system. Non-essential video and audio quality are downgraded even more, and text content might take 2 or 3 hours before its transmitted via satellite due to the uplink schedule.
For colonies on other planets there might be a delay of several days, and video and audio might be down graded below modern day SD video\audio.
If you're on a spaceship or a space station you might not get the data at all, only a notification that there was some new data that you could choose to download if you had spare bandwidth.
It's the equivalent of someone in New York livestreaming in 8K to other New Yorkers, someone in Texas getting a 4K video an hour later, someone in London getting a 420P video the next day, and someone in Africa getting an SMS message to say that a new video is online at 320 maybe some time later that week.
How would this vast disparity in when you get content and what quality it is effect social media production and use?
Would the future Youtube be more like Tiktok than Nexflix because everyone wants to make their content available as widely as possible and so keep things as brief as possible, would people revert back to plain text, or would we see people living in social media bubbles where they only consume high quality local media?
Overall, the society in this universe is 5 minutes into the future from us. Faster than light travel, but most other things are just iterative upgrades of today.
