From Organic Community to Synthetic Connection
Our media ecosystem has been intentionally designed to shift our time, attention, experiences, and very humanity from the real world to the digital world. It’s time to reclaim our agency.
This week, we’re sharing a piece that I co-wrote with
, which builds on his popular Q&A about how our online lives shape our lives in community. We originally wrote this essay for the Lyceum Movement’s new Preamble journal — and they kindly allowed us to pre-publish it here. It’s a BIG topic to tackle — involving the complex interaction between our time, attention, and relationships — and we certainly didn’t cover everything in 1,500 words. But we hope it offers an invitation to consider, challenge, and expand on our thinking. - SamFrom The Work of Local Culture, by Wendell Berry:
"I was walking one Sunday afternoon several years ago with an older friend. We went by the ruining log house that had belonged to his grandparents and great-grandparents. The house stirred my friend’s memory, and he told how the oldtime people used to visit each other in the evenings, especially in the long evenings of winter. There used to be a sort of institution in our part of the country known as ‘sitting till bedtime.’ After supper, when they weren’t too tired, neighbors would walk across the fields to visit each other. They popped corn, my friend said, and ate apples and talked. They told each other stories. They told each other stories, as I knew myself, that they had all heard before. Sometimes they told stories about each other, about themselves, living again in their own memories, and thus keeping their memories alive. Among the hearers of these stories were always the children. When bedtime came, the visitors lit their lanterns and went home. My friend talked about this, and thought about it, and then he said, ‘They had everything but money.’
Most of the descendants of those people have now moved away … and most of them no longer sit in the evenings and talk to anyone. Most of them now sit until bedtime, watching TV, submitting every few minutes to a salestalk … By television and other public means, we are encouraged to imagine that we are far advanced beyond sitting till bedtime with the neighbors on a Kentucky ridgetop, and indeed beyond anything we ever were before …
But a forty-eight-hour power failure would involve almost unimaginable deprivations … Such a calamity—and it is a modest one among those that our time has made possible—would thus reveal how far most of us are now living from our cultural and economic sources, and how extensively we have destroyed the foundations of local life. It would show us how far we have strayed from the locally centered life of such neighborhoods as the one my friend described—a life based to considerable extent upon what we now call solar energy, which is decentralized, democratic, clean and free. If we note that much of the difference we are talking about can be accounted for as an increasing dependence upon energy sources that are centralized, undemocratic, filthy and expensive, we will have completed a sort of historical parable."
Twentieth-century prophets like Wendell Berry were clear-eyed about how new forms of media undermined the very foundations of local community life.
We replaced the time we spent talking with neighbors with time spent sitting in front of a TV screen. We replaced attending to the proximate and tangible with attending to the distant and abstract. And we replaced engaging with our rich local cultures, instead engaging with the monoculture of consumerism.
If we had already completed a “historical parable” when Wendell first wrote The Work of Local Culture in 1988 — when television was the primary threat — then where are we nearly 40 years later, in a world dominated by smartphones, social media, streaming services, and emergent AI chatbots?
To use, perhaps, overly technical language: we’re in deep shit. Today, we live in a media ecosystem where trillion and hundred-billion-dollar companies have business models that depend on capturing as much of our leisure time as possible. Today, these same companies intentionally feed us outrage- and amusement-inducing content to keep us “engaged.” Today, we live in local media deserts where our only media option is to attend to the distant and placeless. And, today, increasingly, we are being given options for synthetic connection — from affinity- and identity-based TikTok “communities,” to AI “companions” — that fool us into believing we’re getting the real thing.
The big loser in all of this is the organic ecology of families, neighbors, and community groups that make up local civic life. Our online lives fundamentally shape our offline lives in our local communities: as our leisure time, attention, and desire for connection have been captured, the once rich soil of our associational lives in community becomes shallow and barren. And as this associational soil erodes, we feel we have few other options beyond the synthetic participation and connection that online life offers.
This is the intentional design of our current commercialized media ecosystem: to shift our time, attention, experiences, and very humanity from the real world to the digital world. Since the introduction of the television, local civic life has been fighting to survive.
A wholesale migration from offline to online life
The first principle of the media business is simple: Our time equals their money.
I (Sam) once took a course at Stanford Graduate School of Business called “Economics of Media, Entertainment, & Communications Sector.” On the first day of class, the professor exclaimed, “The business model of media is to capture as much of your leisure time as possible. If this is the only thing you take away from the class, I will have done my job.” Look around, and you can see this competition for our leisure time playing out across our media ecosystem. More hours streaming on Netflix means fewer hours streaming on Hulu. More minutes scrolling on Facebook means more opportunities for “engagements” with their ads. More time spent on “Character.AI” means more subscription dollars and less churn for the AI companion company.
But you know what else is competing for our leisure time? Our families, friends, neighbors, and community groups. Time is zero-sum: more time in front of our screens means less time spent embedded in the rich messiness of human relationships and local community. And, in the face of competition from the tech and media giants, our neighbors, community groups, and houses of worship have been severely outmatched.
This story isn’t just about the monopolization of our time, however; it’s also about the content that consumes our time. Engagement in our media ecosystem is typically driven by two forces: conflict or amusement (and, oftentimes, both simultaneously). Amusement contributes to its share of issues, but conflict is the real pathogen for our social lives. While these platforms lift up all sorts of conflict-driven and emotionally charged content, they love to make us upset — at the world, at ourselves, and especially at each other. If the average person spends 2.5 hours a day consuming media that poisons our relationships (and almost 5 hours a day for the average teen), the prospects for rebuilding our proximate and tangible communities seem grim.
As I (Soren) put it in a recent Connective Tissue interview: “If the antidote to isolation … is connection, what's causing our isolation … is also preventing connection from happening. It's like an autoimmune disease where it starts by convincing you to erase the very solutions that would help address the problem you have in the first place.” The more time we spend online, the more we become cynical about the status quo, pessimistic about our future, and distrustful of other people. Not only does this adversely shape how we perceive other humans, but it also leads us to disengage more and more from real-life social interactions. The more we disengage, the more we fall back on the only thing we have left: conflict- and outrage-driven media spaces which further reinforce our negativity and pessimism about other people.
This witch’s brew of leisure time capture and corrosive content consumption also shifts the very things we attend to. Our media platforms are intentionally designed to hijack our attention and compel us to spend more time on them. We see this in everything from the “infinite scroll” feature on social media, to the “autoplay” function on streaming services, to the creation of AI companions to mimic human empathy. We’re being psychologically manipulated to attend to our screens at the expense of everything else around us. But the content and medium matter, too. When national and placeless info-tainment displaces local news (and, before that, oral storytelling) from our information ecosystems, we attend less to the communal, natural, and moral ecologies of our particular places. We’ve become like gardeners who have gone on a permanent, attentional vacation: As we attend more to the things that are distant from us — be it the social lives of celebrities or the latest outrage in Washington — we cease to cultivate the relational soil of our neighborhoods and communities.
As big tech and media companies have orchestrated this wholesale migration from offline life to online life, we’ve been fed the lie that we’re experiencing authentic participation and connection. But we’re not — we’re experiencing a simulacrum of these embodied human experiences. “Engaging” with others online is not the same as being in relationship with your friends and neighbors. Joining an online “community” is not the same as being a genuine member of one in-real-life. And having an ongoing conversation with your AI “companion” is not the same as having genuine companionship with another human being.
Deep down, most of us recognize this reality. But, here’s the catch: these synthetic connections have been designed to be easy and frictionless, while still giving us the short-term dopamine hits to make us feel like we’re getting the real thing. So, when we have a choice between the friction-full complexity of human relationships and community or the frictionless ease of online life, more often than not, we’re choosing the latter.
Reclaiming our agency
All of this might seem grim — and that’s because it is. But the seemingly darkest moments are when the seeds of new possibilities are planted.
The big lie in all of this is that we have no agency to cultivate these possibilities. While most of us no longer believe that technology will create a “global village” or “bring the world closer together,” neither should we believe that we’re helpless in the face of the technological forces acting upon us. Try as they will to keep us online and in our homes, the tech and media companies are working against our human nature. We live for connection: to other humans, to the natural world, and to something bigger than ourselves. No simulacrum of participation, membership, or companionship can ever genuinely replace this innate human need.
If we’re at the start of a new 50-year cycle for regenerating the relational soil of local civic life, then we need to reclaim our agency to be civic cultivators. We can draw inspiration from groups like Warm Cookies of the Revolution and build in-real-life outlets for community that are more fun than Netflix and shopping online. We can draw inspiration from D.J. Trischler’s Claypole Commons and choose to attend to our particular block and our particular neighbors over distant places and people. And, we can draw inspiration from the ethos of Elise Granata’s GROUP HUG, embracing the mysterious and unpredictable “human funk” of community over the productized frictionlessness of online life.
Paradoxically, we can also realize our agency by repurposing the very tools that have been turned on us to foment consumption, isolation, and division into tools that foster co-creation, connection, and conviviality. This is already happening. In the wake of our media fragmentation, “community media” practitioners are re-localizing media ecosystems in particular places — not to revitalize local news, but to rebuild it from scratch as a more participatory, relational, and community-driven medium. Place-based networks of community-builders are drawing on digital tools like Signal and Notion to connect, share learnings, and build power from the bottom-up and across place. Similar tools are helping neighbors connect with neighbors and encouraging people to attend to what’s most proximate to them: their blocks, neighborhoods, and communities.
Wendell Berry was right: we have completed a historical parable. We’re glued to our screens, we’re disconnected from our neighbors, and we experience a civic life that has become centralized, undemocratic, and expensive.
But history is always being written — and, in this new generational cycle for civic life, we have the agency to reverse this historical parable. Our local communities can once again become sites of relational, communal, and democratic flourishing (and, in many places, become this way for the first time). It’s on us to own our agency.
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Can’t agree more with so much that was said in this well-rounded article. Thank you. 👏 I’m curious how you think about the benefit that you, me, and other readers receive from screens and the online world—particularly as writers on Substack. I know Substack differs from other social media sites, but in general we too benefit from people’s attention in the online realm. This is something I ponder a lot, which is why I ask. What would this look like in a healthy community? Would we still have online spaces for writers or would it move into a non-digital space?