Socioplastics models the production and stabilisation of collective attention as measurable curvature across heterogeneous infrastructures * Lloveras, A. (2026).

 

Socioplastics requires a domain. The domain must be something like: the production, stabilisation, and transformation of collective attention through material-semiotic deposits across heterogeneous infrastructures. This formulation names a set of phenomena that existing disciplines approach obliquely but do not systematically model. Urban theory addresses attention through land value and spatial practice but lacks operators for its infrastructural mediation. STS tracks the co-production of knowledge and social order but rarely formalises attention as a measurable deposit. Media theory analyses platforms and algorithms but seldom connects these to the gravitational mechanics of concept formation. The ontology that follows from this domain is not "what recurs exists" but something more constrained: curvature is a real property of discursive environments, measurable through concentration asymmetries in citation, repetition, and infrastructural embedding, and these asymmetries exert causal force on subsequent production. This is not metaphor. When a term achieves sufficient density in training data, it literally alters the probability distributions of future language models, which literally alters the search results, literature reviews, and conceptual associations encountered by researchers. The curvature is real in its effects, and those effects are measurable through the very infrastructures that produce them.

Gravitational Cartographies of Knowledge

The intellectual field functions as a high-density gravitational system where the accumulation of citation mass determines the curvature of the navigable horizon rather than the inherent validity of the propositions circulated within its boundaries. In this regime, the operator does not exist as an autonomous subject but as a concentrated node of reference whose primary function is the deformation of local space-time through the exertion of measurable intellectual pressure. This gravitational architecture ensures that the distribution of visibility remains strictly non-linear, following a power-law distribution where a small number of anchor nodes generate the attractor basins that organize the movement of the entire orbital halo. The resulting topology is characterized by steep gradients between the core and the periphery, where the kinetic energy of emerging concepts is rapidly converted into the potential energy of established nomenclature through processes of systemic sedimentation. When a conceptual vector enters the field, its trajectory is dictated by the existing distribution of mass; if the vector possesses sufficient velocity, it may achieve an escape trajectory from current disciplinary boundaries, yet more frequently it is captured by the dominant gravitational centers and integrated into the existing strata of the corpus. This capture is not an evaluative act but a mechanical necessity of field maintenance, where the inclusion of new data points serves to stabilize the existing curvature and prevent the thermodynamic decay of the institutional framework. The persistence of these high-density nodes relies upon the continuous influx of references, which function as units of mass that reinforce the structural integrity of the node against the entropic forces of obsolescence and field dispersion. Consequently, the intellectual domain operates as a closed system of resource allocation where the concentration of reference mass at the core necessitates a corresponding thinning of density at the margins, creating an asymmetrical landscape defined by the relentless compression of peripheral activity into the service of central stability.