Finding Community Behind the Screen
September 22, 2024
I.
I live in a small town of approximately 1,000 population not far from one of the five largest cities inside a midwestern United State. The county that encompasses this general area is typically shaded blue on an election map, though you wouldn't know it unless you're one of the 100,000 people who live within a five mile radius of the downtown area. I used to be one of those people, long ago in a time I can barely remember anymore.
I like to think I've changed a lot as a person since I moved to a rural area over a decade ago. At the same time, I've not exactly metamorphosed into what you might conceive of as a typical rural American. I enjoy watching sports, drinking beer and experiencing the great outdoors, but that's likely where the surface comparisons end. I spend other parts of my free time on hobbies that some might consider to be quirky, such as tinkering with ancient computers and playing European board games.
Beyond that, I choose not to participate in whatever remains of the monoculture in this pocket of middle American society—potentially to the detriment of a social life I could be having. I don't watch the Yellowstone television show. I don't listen to twangy country ballads. I don't eat choice cuts from the meat market. I don't have the ubiquitous social media app installed on my phone. I don't display signs for the expected political candidate in my yard.
I come from a relatively progressive, educated background. Most people from that bygone era of my life moved to large urban centers to pursue lucrative careers. Others stuck around the area I grew up in, but I don't know of a solitary soul who took the same path as me, deciding to set up shop further down the population pecking order.
Regardless of how I ended up here, this is where I've lived out my adult years up to this point. I've made an effort to serve various roles in the local community when the opportunity presents itself. I've managed to find a few friends in town and a short drive away.
Despite this, I've resigned myself to the fact that I will most likely never build a community of my own in this place. Even if I was financially stable enough to buy property and start a family, I'm not sure I would choose to do so in an area where I don't feel like I truly belong. Until I'm able move on to a new chapter of life, the only place left to turn is online.
II.
When I was in middle school, I attended a seminar about online safety between the designated lunch period and the first class of the afternoon block. I would usually get involved with anything related to computers or technology at school, even if I didn't have much of a choice when it came to this particular event.
During the meeting, the importance of staying anonymous on the internet was drilled into the heads of each attendee lest some cartoonish hacker stalk us from a distance on the computer. This was a reflection of contemporary internet safety guidelines agreed upon by people who may not have fully understood the scale of the issue they were trying to grapple with. The whole thing still seemed fairly reasonable to this adolescent version of myself, despite the histrionics associated with it.
All of a sudden, almost overnight, a switch was flipped. Word of a popular new social website spread like wildfire from the mouths of each of my classmates, even those I had not originally pictured as technologically forward. Everyone decided it was actually fine to pour their life's story into an online database and share it with anybody who cared enough to click on their profile.
I resisted for a while, eventually giving in after an onslaught of peer pressure. In hindsight, it's not so difficult to see the appeal of a centralized repository where inside jokes, funny photos and secret messages could be stored for quick access. It wouldn't be much longer before the newfangled omnipresence of smartphones made the experience even more seamless. The online world, a place that felt like an imaginary oasis separate from tangible reality, was now a compelling way to enhance real life social activity rather than strictly be a refuge from it.
It wasn't as if the social web was an entirely foreign concept to me. I had previously found enjoyment in Myspace during a period of time in which I was starting to get a feel for what the internet had to offer, at least at whatever speed my family's dial-up internet would allow. I appreciated the ability to customize nearly all elements of the profile page on Myspace, the social aspect was almost secondary to the self-expression. I also shared private chats with close friends through AOL Instant Messenger, a quick and easy way to jump into conversation or get a feel for what somebody was thinking without needing to tie up the phone line at home.
The casual, low pressure environment of text chats and web forums made me feel comfortable, confident, able to express myself more fully and directly. There was also something transgressive about the whole experience compared to more traditional methods of after-school communication. Formulating clever inside jokes and vulgar one-ups out of parental earshot didn't feel like it should have been possible in this way, and yet, we were doing it.
In contrast to what came before, the new place everybody was flocking to felt sanitized and lackluster. It seemed like less of a novel idea for a social media site than an amalgamation of several different online services that preceded it, featuring a low barrier of entry that catered more toward a general audience at the expense of the technically minded.
There were some thoughtful features unique to the service that helped it achieve mass appeal in such a short amount of time, but it felt like something was missing. The exploratory nature and excitement of not knowing what the next thing would look like were gone; people actually seemed to prefer it this way. The act of tying real-world identities to each profile page curtailed conversational idiosyncrasies usually enabled by anonymity and opened up unforeseen avenues for interpersonal conflict.
If you've been paying attention, you know what happens next. The wide adoption of Facebook was only the beginning of a tectonic shift in the way people used the internet, the way people conceived of human communication and processed information altogether.
III.
I don't think many people could have predicted how the internet would change the world. Around when it began a slow uphill crawl toward mainstream relevance, news stories claimed that it was a short-term fad. Columnists theorized that most people would never take interest in using it as a primary method of reading news, doing research for school or collaborating on work projects. The guy on the street viewed it as a source of crude entertainment rather than an earth-shattering technological innovation that would radically transform our entire sociological playing field.
In any case, if you've managed to come across this blog post, I'm guessing you have a pretty solid grasp of the dynamics surrounding the modern social web as well as a general idea for how things got to this point. Existing online in any capacity nearly precludes one's ability to avoid reliance on at least one of these pervasive mega-services. They've succeeded in positioning themselves as household names among the less technologically inclined, and in some cases, have become necessary to function in one's career or personal life.
It's now an undeniable fact that data is the most valuable commodity in the world. From the push and pull of shoving advertisements in people's faces to the various ways nefarious actors of different stripes engage in mass surveillance, the modern human is clearly more tracked, documented and profiled than at any other point in history. Products and services that once existed on their own now require you to accept permissions on a mobile app or sign up for an online account just so somebody out there can find yet another angle to harvest more of your personal data.
It's possible to minimize the amount of data extraction that your identity undergoes in the same way it's possible to avert your gaze from the screen and participate more fully in our shared flesh and blood reality. The problem we've run into is the psychological stranglehold that technology now has on everyday people. The most successful tech companies design their devices, software and web presence in ways that ensure the most effective manipulation of their user base. You see this play out in gaming, news sources, online shopping and yes, social media.
Some of these techniques involve twisting people's thought patterns and personality traits into distorted, unnatural shapes that serve one function: keeping them addicted to the screen. Dopamine feedback loops administered by the screen turn otherwise functional, productive members of society into unthinking drones or worse, dogmatic zealots. Consider the intensified political polarization caused by online media, an observable cultural phenomenon that continues to tear families and friendships apart.
The naked goal of modern technology is to position itself between people, acting as a middleman for all human relationships. People stare at their phones while riding the subway or sitting in waiting rooms at the doctor's office. People are more content to immerse themselves in endless screen time than picking up a hobby, learning a skill or putting themselves out into the world in a way that requires any amount of discomfort.
The screen fixation psychologically foisted upon us by the tech industry is very much about maximizing ad impressions, but it's also about control. It benefits big tech companies to create these invisible zones of control around people in part because these zones are an expression of the ultimate individualist fantasy. It is an all-encompassing vision for how humans should carry out their lives, one so vibrant that it blinds the rest of us to any alternative.
Instead of finding commonality with those in our circles, we're finding reasons to keep them outside of our box. Rather than seeing our fellow humans as equals worthy of coexistence, we see them as competitors, as greater or lesser than, and sometimes as undeserving wretches who deserve to be ground down by the system. A genuine link cannot be formed when nobody is content to simply be on the same footing as somebody else.
Hierarchy is an immutable force of nature, at least in the minds of powerful, influential and otherwise well-off people. What more is hierarchy than a numerical power level assigned to each individual bag of flesh and bones? There is an undeniable psychological component associated with large numbers; people love to have millions of dollars in the same way they love to have millions of followers on social media. It's only natural that social sites owned by people who fetishize imaginary numbers are designed from the ground up around the aggrandizement of the number.
From another perspective, one I personally find more sympathetic, it is this very hierarchy that creates alienation among people of all social status. Wealthy people who have all of their wants and needs met end up miserable because they are entirely removed from the creation of that wealth; they have no emotional ties to a world that exists largely for their benefit. Working class people are forced to compete with each other for a shrinking portion of available wealth, sowing distrust and breeding animosity among those who most closely align with each other's interests.
Even though people of all walks of life are more lonely and miserable than ever before, the power to make sweeping change in reaction to these feelings has been negated from the start. Those who are most equipped to dismantle hierarchy have the least motivation to do so, and vice-versa. This self-fulfilling prophecy acts as a cornerstone of all social structures in public life.
Social media is a manifestation of this framework, the 21st century frontier of our zero-sum existence. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter and TikTok are noteworthy examples of these modern day wonders of the world, grandiose digital sculptures of incomprehensible detail erected as displays of corporate dominance over the general populace.
I didn't always hold this perspective. It took a long, winding pathway of life experience and contemplation to arrive at these conclusions. I used to be like everyone else. I accepted the way things were as an inevitability in the same way that I signed up for every new app people around me were talking about, because that's just what you did.
At one point, I had amassed one thousand friends on Facebook. The greatest lie I ever believed is that one thousand people were my friends.
IV.
Socializing requires some amount of compromise. You need to give away part of your time and energy to partake in conversations or activities you wouldn't have chosen to engage with on your own. On some level, we have to suppress our true nature if we want to be a part of other people's lives.
The internet has radically transformed this near universal understanding of human interaction. Now, you can squeeze out the bits that are relevant to your interests while ignoring paragraphs of fluff you don't believe are worth your time. You can join a niche cluster of people that share specific interests in a way that wouldn't be possible in the real world without some amount of organizing and travel.
Before the information superhighway was accessible to the public, monoculture spread through the many less advanced forms of mass media. You were living under a rock if you didn't know what was going on in the lives of famous celebrities and national politicians. Today, monoculture exists in both greater and lesser form, with disparate countercultural enclaves forming around it to satisfy every possible viewpoint. The grand narrative has been diluted through information overload, but in a paradoxical way, its influence has grown stronger than ever before. The internet has become a big box store of ideas, open 24 hours a day.
This gradual shift in cultural dynamics and the vectors through which information spreads is parallel with the way our lives in the here and now have been shaped. Human beings used to congregate out of necessity for their survival and communities formed from this shared material condition. Today, our ability to survive comes from fulfilling these impersonal societal roles where peers exist more as competitors than collaborators. Carving out something that approaches a decent life under the weight of the modern economy necessitates you moving further away from a familiar, natural place in the world.
Just as people convene in packed geographic areas to find a career, people also convene in fewer distinct places in the digital world for communication, entertainment and creative output. More time spent working to survive means less time for independent thought, for planning, for discovering new things. People feel captured by circumstance, afraid of risk because they are too enmeshed in what already is or left without something else to fall back on. The despair of this wrongheaded, compulsory existence as number counters and consumers of things leaves us depressed, ashamed, socially atomized and perhaps more to the point, pliant for the influence of the screen.
At risk of sounding like a low effort anti-social media image macro, I think we should consider the ways that online socializing makes us lonelier, more sheltered individuals. Losing perspective on what goes on around us while shaping our interests around unrelatable, niche topics can lead us down a patently destructive life path. Addiction to social media leaves us clinging to a rung on a towering hierarchical ladder with no end in sight.
Face-to-face interaction is not a source of infinite dopamine feedback, it's not supposed to have an innate numerical value associated with it. It can be messy, tedious and downright upsetting. It's also what we're supposed to be doing. We were lucky enough to be born with a higher intelligence, we should be using it to enrich our lives through shared experience.
While this all may be true, we have to acknowledge that the outside world can be a hostile place for people who are seeking connection. If you live in the United States, there's a chance that you find yourself living in a car-centric environment spread far away from others. The lack of population density and walkability in many parts of the country leaves people with few options to find a community they belong with in their local area.
Because of the previously discussed political environment, it's a guessing game if you will come across somebody you feel comfortable spending time with. Mainstream news media gins up raucous crowds of inconsiderate hatemongers who could never learn to appreciate the differences between people. If you're part of a marginalized group, how can you believe that your safety is a priority in the mind of a total stranger? Is it actually worth sacrificing your personal values to find common ground with somebody who isn't likely to do the same?
A society shaped around competition and exploitation is antithetical to community building. Mentally, financially, conversationally sound people have the luxury to form connections with others in the outside world without much effort. Disabled people, unhoused people, socially awkward people, people who have to work multiple jobs or people who can't afford the medication that keeps them sane are all at a clear disadvantage. Able-bodied, heteronormative people with disposable incomes don't often think about these problems because they don't affect them, some even look down upon those they see as losers and have-nots, so nothing is poised to change.
If you feel like you are alone in the world, you should sit with that feeling—don't just turn to escapism as your only salve. But, at the same time, I wouldn't blame you if you felt like escapism was your only option.
V.
As an adult, I've found text-based communication to still be an efficient, sometimes preferable method of expressing myself. I usually take a few moments to consider how to respond, a privilege that is almost never afforded in typical conversation. In a way, that's a central reason for why I decided to create this blog.
It might seem counterintuitive, then, that I didn't handle the transition to a social media-dominant culture very well as I aged out of school. I'm just not that good at maintaining friendships from a distance, and I've grown to resent the social pressures of an environment where it's expected to respond to a request for contact at any time of the day. Countless other people do not seem to have this experience, and that makes me feel alone.
I like to be alone. I value having time at my disposal to enrich myself, work on personal projects or just do whatever it is I find enjoyable in the moment. Trying to square this circle of needing community without the will to actually find it is a strange feeling I struggle to reckon with.
Life in a rural area is a shield from confronting reality, a post hoc justification for why it all ended up this way. Am I really to blame for not being as socially active as I once was? Surely not, there's nothing to do, nowhere to go and everyone I meet likes the wrong things.
I grew up on the screen, and it more accurately describes where I live today than any physical location. I'm left to wonder how different things would be if I packed up and moved somewhere with more potential for social interaction, for meeting larger groups of people who I can potentially relate to on a stronger level.
Through gaming, online chats and social sites, I've met all kinds of people I enjoy interacting with. They all have their own interests, desires and flaws, just like me. My people exist in the world, I'm just having trouble finding them.
I know I'm not the only person who feels this way. Loneliness is a veritable epidemic that affects people of all age groups, no matter where they live. Working to survive grinds us into dust, leaving us with no energy to do anything but look at the screen. Cultural subgroups we find in the screen can leave us splintered, lacking in connectivity.
That being said, we don't have to be lonely. A simulacrum of a friendship provided by a connection to the vast interconnected digital network still has traits of a friendship. It can be a reinvigorating experience to discover that somebody else thinks and feels the same way as you, even if that other person lives a thousand miles away.
The thing about the internet—a fact many people seem to forget—is that it's not just five or six interchangeable websites. I think the broad scope of available information and access to a diverse crowd of human minds is actually an astounding feat, an invaluable aspect of living in the present day that too often gets taken for granted. There are so many places beyond the top 15 social media apps to expand your mind or meet people who can have a lasting impact on your life.
I credit the internet for providing me access to a greater consciousness, a tapestry of humanity that can be appreciated from anywhere in the world. Access to ebooks, blogs, podcasts, video essays and livestreams has helped me develop a worldview that is ironically more tethered to reality than anything I seem to come across outside my front door. I wouldn't be the person I am today without it, for better or worse.
I think it's alright if you want to find community in the screen. I don't think it's alright that it ends up being some people's only choice, but you shouldn't feel like it's anything less than what it is. I just hope, someday, we'll all be able to find community behind it too.
(Originally published on my blog: https://read-only.net/posts/2024-09-22-Finding%20Community%20Behind%20the%20Screen.html)