atomize

Binge-watching and the content boom helped atomize American culture.

From Washington Post ● Apr. 20, 2022

When you’re in the big city, you can atomize, right?

From The Verge ● May 31, 2018

This may change things or it could completely atomize the island once and for all.

From Slate ● Oct. 16, 2017

The effect parallels the subsequent crumbling of Vereen’s career and also Arceneaux’s attempt to atomize the damaging event.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jun. 16, 2017

In these motors it is necessary to atomize the liquid fuel by means of aspired air, in order to produce an explosive, gaseous mixture.

From Gas-Engines and Producer-Gas Plants A Practice Treatise Setting Forth the Principles of Gas-Engines and Producer Design, the Selection and Installation of an Engine, Conditions of Perfect Operation, Producer-Gas Engines and Their Possibilities, the Care of Gas-Engines and Producer-Gas Plants, with a Chapter on Volatile Hydrocarbon and Oil Engines by R. E. Mathot

Focusing on individual privacy protections isolates and atomizes us, however, while power rests in collective bodies.

From Slate ● Jan. 28, 2022

“These procedures call for fuel to be dumped over designated unpopulated areas, typically at higher altitudes so the fuel atomizes and disperses before it reaches the ground.”

From Seattle Times ● Jan. 14, 2020

The company spent the past five years engineering a showerhead that atomizes water, creating tiny droplets the company says cover 10 times more surface area than a normal shower to.

From Time ● Aug. 11, 2015

Lawrence; "Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It" is not about yoga; "Zona" reflectively atomizes the film "Stalker" by Andrei Tarkovsky. 

From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 24, 2015

It's that music can evaporate blue moods even as it atomizes them.

From Time Magazine Archive

His philosophy could only make sense in a perfectly atomized society in which individuals’ actions don’t affect others—but no such world exists.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 14, 2026

In its most recent season, “60 Minutes” attracted an average of more than 9 million viewers External link per show, an anomaly in today’s atomized media environment.

From Barron's ● Jun. 5, 2026

Late night TV, which once had to be watched, well, late at night — it had a sort of circadian component — has been atomized into clips to watch when you like.

From Los Angeles Times ● May 2, 2025

Under such a paradigm history must be sterilized of analysis and ultimately atomized into unrelated instances to make an eternal present, divorced from any transformative potential.

From Salon ● Feb. 25, 2025

Everything was turned to a fine, atomized dust that hung suspended in the air for a second before slowly settling to earth.

From "Ready Player One: A Novel" by Ernest Cline

The New York Times is “disbanding” its sports department, atomizing the staff and pushing readers to pay extra for sports coverage by The Athletic, a money-losing news startup it bought last year for $550 million.

From Seattle Times ● Jul. 12, 2023

As Rushkoff puts it: "those of us without the funding to disown our humanity. . . don't have to use technology in such antisocial, atomizing ways."

From Salon ● Jun. 30, 2020

“U.S. culture is extremely atomizing, especially in terms of how suburban neighborhoods and apartment buildings work,” they said.

From Washington Post ● Jun. 16, 2020

Others point to the atomizing effects of the internet on inter-human relations.

From New York Times ● Jul. 4, 2018

The atomizing method carried to its logical extreme demands that not only 'sensations' but also 'thoughts' should be essentially disconnected, and then, of course, no thinking can cohere.

From Pragmatism by D. L. Murray