Posts Tagged ‘connection’
“They are alone together”*…
Andrew Trousdale and Erik J. Langer bridge the years between Robert Putnam‘s Bowling Alone and Jonathan Haidt‘s The Anxious Generation with a brief history of the trade-off between convenience and connection in America. From Zach Rauch’s introduction…
The Anxious Generation is best understood as a three-act tragedy. Act I begins in the mid-20th century, when new social and entertainment technologies (e.g., air conditioning and television) set in motion a long, gradual collapse of local community. Act II begins in the 1980s, as the loss of local community weakened social trust and helped erode the play-based childhood. Act III begins in the early 2010s, with the arrival of the phone-based childhood that filled the vacuum left behind.
This post, written by Andrew Trousdale and Erik Larson, goes deep into Act I. Andrew is a psychology researcher and human-computer interaction designer who is co-running a project on the psychological tradeoffs of progress. Erik is the author of The Myth of Artificial Intelligence, writes the Substack Colligo, and is completing the MIT Press book Augmented Human Intelligence: Being Human in an Age of AI, due in 2026. Together, they show how the isolation we experience today did not begin with smartphones but began decades earlier, as Americans, often for good and understandable reasons, traded connection for convenience, and place-based relationships for privacy and control.
Tracing these trade-offs across the twentieth century, Andrew and Erik help explain the problem of loneliness we face today, and offer some guidance for how we can turn it around and reconnect with our neighbors. Robert Putnam, who read a recent draft, described it as “easily the best, most comprehensive, and most persuasive piece on the contemporary social capital conundrum I’ve yet read.”…
Trousdale and Langer trace the social, cultural, economic, political, and technological forces that have played out from the the late 1940s to today. It is, at once, familiar and shocking. They conclude…
When we asked Robert Putnam what gives him hope, he pointed to history. In The Upswing, he reminds us that Americans faced a similar crisis before. The Gilded Age brought economic inequality, industrialization, and the rise of anonymous urban life. Small-town bonds gave way to tenements and factory floors. Trust collapsed. By the 1890s, social capital had reached historic lows — roughly where it stands today.
The Progressive reformers found this new world unacceptable, but they didn’t try to turn back the clock. Cities and factories were here to stay. Instead, they adapted, creating new forms of connection suited to their changed reality, from settlement houses for anonymous neighborhoods to women’s clubs that built networks of mutual aid. They didn’t reject modernity; they metabolized it, showing up day after day to create new institutions and communities suited to the industrialized world.
Decades ago Neil Postman observed in Amusing Ourselves to Death that we haven’t been conquered by technology — we’ve surrendered to it because we like the stimulation and cheap amusement. More recently, Nicholas Carr concludes in Superbloom that we’re complicit in our loneliness because we embrace these superficial, mediated forms of connection. Like Postman and Carr, the Progressive Era reformers understood where they had agency when technology upended their world. It isn’t in demanding that others fix systems we willingly participate in, nor is it in outright rejecting technologies that deliver real benefits — it’s in changing how we ourselves live with and make use of the tools that surround us.
There are already signs that people are willing to do this. In a small, three-day survey, Talker Research found that 63% of Gen Z now intentionally unplug — the highest rate of any generation — and that half of Americans are spending less time on screens for their well-being, and their top alternative activity is time with friends and family. And they found that two-thirds of Americans are embracing “slow living,” with 84% adopting analog lifestyle choices like wristwatches and paper notebooks that help them unplug. Meanwhile in Eventbrite’s “Reset to Real” survey, 74% of young adults say in-person experiences matter more than digital ones. New devices like the Light Phone, Brick, Meadow, and Daylight Computer signal a growing demand for utility without distraction.
Unplugging isn’t enough on its own. The time and energy we reclaim has to go toward building social connections: hosting the dinner party despite the hassle, staying for coffee after church when you’d rather go home, sitting through the awkward silence, offering or asking for help.
Ultimately, we can’t expect deep social connection in a culture that prioritizes individual ease and convenience. Nor is community something technology can deliver for us. What’s required is a change of culture, grounded in a basic fact of human nature: that authentic connection requires action and effort, and that this action and effort is part of what makes connection fulfilling in the first place.
We can form new rituals and institutions that allow us to adapt to technology, ultimately changing it to our liking. But it starts with the tools we use and the choices we make each day. If we all prioritize the individual comforts and conveniences we’ve grown accustomed to, no one else will restore the community we say we miss. No one else can. If we want deeper relationships and better communities than we have, we’re going to have to put more of our time, effort, and attention into the people around us.
History shows that we can adapt, building communities suited to changing times. The question is: Will we stay in and scroll? Or will we go out and choose one another?…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Scrolling Alone.”
In the spirit of the call for forward-looking determination, pair with “The Displacement of Purpose” from Peter Adam Boeckel (“If AI automates production, then humanity must automate compassion. Only then will progress remember what it was for.”)
[Image above: source]
* Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone (in which he also observed: “People divorced from community, occupation, and association are first and foremost among the supporters of extremism.”)
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As we get together, we might spare a thought for Aldus Manutius; he died on this date in 1515. A printer and humanist, he founded the Aldine Press. In the books he published, he introduced a standardized system of punctuation and use of the semicolon. He designed many fonts, and created italic type (which he named for Italy).
And apropos the piece featured above, we might note that on this date in 1965 “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” the first major hit for the Righteous Brothers, simultaneously reached #1 on both the Billboard and Cash Box charts in the US as well as the UK singles chart. The song was produced by Phil Spector (who had discovered the duo at a San Francisco show) for his own label, Philles Records. All the songs previously produced by Spector for Philles featured African-American singers; the Righteous Brothers were his first white vocal act– they had a vocal style, blue-eyed soul, that suited Spector.
“I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad.”*…
Further to a recent post on “seeing like a system” (and in a fashion, to last Monday’s post on misinformation), a provocative essay by Rohit Krishnan…
We’re living through a phase change that is at the root of a lot of our societal problems. It’s the fact that our information networks have become much more dense.
You exist as a node in a network. Other people are other nodes. They send you information, the edges. You process it, you create your own. Information flows in all directions.
There are all sorts of networks. If you imagine all of us as nodes and the information we receive from each other via edges, then the shape of the network defines the type of information that spreads.
When the type of information is extremely tantalising, one that spreads fast, then the whole network gets taken over with that information. And there’s even a tipping point at which the information breaks containment and spreads through the whole network. Here’s an excellent essay on the subject…
When there are a lot of neighbours to which a node is connected, then various types of information spreads much faster through the network. This is called network density, how many edges are connected on average to each node. And increased density means that there’s many more routes by which information can spread.
This is why cities have much higher rates of “cultural transmission” compared to rural areas. Or why in domains like fashion or ideas or innovation or language or even food, the speed of change and variety is much higher in cities. Because each new unit of culture can transmit from person to person so much faster when there are more people it can connect to.
Ok, this is basics about what a network is. But what happens when the entire world gets interconnected such that we’re all connected to each other much more densely? What would have changed in ourselves? Our culture?
Historically, you used to only have a few sources of news or information. Things that percolated through to your network or things you read in the news. Now information comes from all sides, hungry for your attention. And your “processing power” to make sense of this information hasn’t meaningfully changed.
Imagine seeing the world from this vantage point. A blinding array of data streaming at you, standing as a node. Some from near, some from afar. You take it all in, process it, and build up a sense of the world from it, including a sense of the other people and their beliefs reflecting back, from near and far.
If you do this, as a sentient being, you can’t help but develop a world model. A sense of the world, a sense of what others think of the world, perhaps even another layer or two. Even if you develop it only to help speed up the information processing that you need to do. It will be different in structure for each of you, of course, but part of a shared consensus reality nonetheless. A sense made up of all the information that came your way, including the sense you have of all the sense of information that came other people’s way, which helps them process the information flowing their way. Creating a collective sense of what’s going on, a knowledge of the shared reality in which we live.
We call this our culture…
Culture is the digital biosphere we create for ourselves. Culture is the infosphere we all swim in. If you think of the information that we all swap with each other as water, culture is the ocean made up of it, or a distilled version of the most common or communally known parts of that ocean.
Edward Hall, in his books Silent Language and Beyond Culture, writes about how culture is composed of the communication patterns, behaviours, and symbols that are shared amongst a group. We can think of culture as the common interconnected web that underlay the beliefs that we all hold, which constantly changes and evolves as our beliefs spread.
This is especially salient because part of the culture now is filled with efforts of many to escape it. This isn’t new, of course, and have existed since Thoreau. But there is an increase in it. People try tools for thought and software to recommend things or remember things, or AI to remember everything they read and interacted with, all so that there can be a way to deal with the information avalanche.
While this makes sense for an individual, the fact that this collectively defines the information ecosystem around us also means that the problem is on the supply side. This is why there is the rise of private spaces, especially since Twitter’s demise. Hence the theory that we live in the dark forest era of the internet:
Is our universe an empty forest or a dark one? If it’s a dark forest, then only Earth is foolish enough to ping the heavens and announce its presence. The rest of the universe already knows the real reason why the forest stays dark. It’s only a matter of time before the Earth learns as well.
This is also what the internet is becoming: a dark forest.
In response to the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviors, we’re retreating to our dark forests of the internet, and away from the mainstream.
The push to create private spaces, on discord or group chats, to truly express oneself or let mini-ecosystems flourish, they all are needed to make us stop sitting with our face deep inside the information superhighway. It’s to help make the networks you’re in a bit sparser.
And my thesis is that almost everything that we see that pushes against the cultural state we used to recognise, is as a result of this densification of our information networks. Whether it is group chats, private forums, discord, smartphones that are not that smart, yearning for the flip phones from Motorola, various tools for thought, AI software to help you focus, better note taking tools, the angst against media headlines, the disbelief in economic and political institutions, the underlying sense of malaise that seemingly everyone feels, the vibes.
And the way we’re interconnected changes the way we see and process information that comes our way, which changes the culture. The form of the network changes the way the network operates.
In the era of superfast many-to-many communication, the ideas that spread are the ones which can “take over” the entire spectrum. Small ideas grow, wither, die. It’s only the memetic megafauna that survive.
In a sparse network you might have pockets which retain their individuality and survive for longer. Like Galapagos syndrome for ideas. Both good and bad.
Letting your ecosystem interact with the external giant internet might mean it will die out or get outcompeted…
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… The outcome of having a dense network is insidious but powerful. It means only the narratives which can go viral do go viral. The collective epistemic commons becomes filled with those narratives which outcompete the others and muscle their way to the top. It means that at a time of unprecedented low unemployment, high wages, high standard of living, GDP growth, high stock markets, strong dollar, people in the US still think they’re living in the worst of all possible times. An anti-Panglossian sentiment.
It means that everyone is convinced everyone else is having a bad time. We’re surrounded by vibes about everyone’s life getting worse, wars and famine and pestilence and injustice worldwide. We see gaffes and mistakes made by everyone laid bare instantly.
The denser network makes the impact of the message change. It molds itself to the medium.
At some level of interconnectivity, we all fall prey to the weaknesses of information deluge. Our attention is finite and so is our processing capacity for information. You can have the world do a denial of service attack on your cognition by overwhelming it with bits of information, so you’re stuck in place like a fly in amber. And it does this so easily that we haven’t even recognised when it happens let alone how to prevent it.
That too is why we have so many tools for thought, and ways to capture notes to search them afterwards, and tools for doing work about work, and endless lists and notes and contextual reminders and and and … It’s why we yearn for cultural islanding. It’s why there’s the never-ending “current thing”. We’re all left tilting at the windmill of being a node in a dense network…
Dense networks, dark forests: “Seeing Like a Network,” from @krishnanrohit.
(Image above: source)
* “Howard Beale” (Peter Finch), Network
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As we deal with density, we might recall that it was on this date in 1974, at 8:01a, that the bar code made its retail debut: the first OPC-coded item, a ten pack of Wrigley’s chewing gum, was canned at the Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio by cashier Sharon Buchanan for customer Clyde Dawson.
Bar codes are now, of course, ubiquitous in retail, but are also widely used in healthcare, transport and logistics, mail, parcel, and baggage handling, and ticketing.
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