How to shape the technology that shapes us
Our digital habits are reshaping us in profound ways. To understand its role in our lives and its impact on society, it can be helpful to take a broader sociological perspective.
How does it shape our relationships, influence our behaviors, and even redefine our communities?
Derek Thompson of The Atlantic addresses these questions in his recent article, “The Anti-Social Century.”
In this week’s newsletter, we use that article as a launching point to explore the relationship between technology and isolation, and what we can do to shape the technology that is shaping us.
// The first decade of withdrawal
The 20th century was a social century. For many decades, U.S. church membership was high. Labor union participation spiked after World War II. There was a post-war baby boom, and the U.S. invested in libraries as a form of social infrastructure.
But things changed in the 1970s as the structures and institutions that brought people together began to lose their power. Why? In his book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam cited two technologies that had by then become ubiquitous: the automobile and the television. Cars enabled the growth of suburbs and a more private, nuclear-family-oriented life. The television enticed people to spend their leisure time not in libraries but consuming shows.
As Thompson noted in his article in The Atlantic, from 1965 to 1995, the typical adult gained six hours a week in leisure time, which they spent nearly all of in front of their television.
// From remote work to remote life
Fast forward to 2020, and we may have entered a second decade of withdrawal. In 2022, after the peak of the COVID pandemic was over and people had returned to work and restaurants, adults still spent an additional 99 minutes at home on any given day compared with 2003, according to Princeton University sociologist Patrick Sharkey, who published a journal article in 2024 on the findings.
Remote work has become a “remote life,” where we don’t just work at home, but also eat, shop, be entertained, and even worship. This trend is concerning, as Liana Sayer, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, found that “well-being is higher among adults who spend larger shares of leisure with others.”
All of this is enabled by technology that has made it easier than ever to stay plugged in while being apart. The economy has reoriented around tech-powered convenience—from the rise of Zoom to e-commerce shopping to food delivery apps.
// The missing relational layers of a remote life
“Home-based, phone-based culture has arguably solidified our closest and most distant connections, the inner ring of family and best friends (bound by blood and intimacy) and the outer ring of the tribe (linked by shared affinities),” Thompson wrote in The Atlantic.
What’s missing, according to Marc J. Dunkelman, a research fellow at Brown University, is that we’re not investing in the middle ring of “familiar but not intimate” relationships with the people who live in physical proximity to us.
Dunkelman told Thompson that spending time with this middle ring of acquaintances is the key to social cohesion because it teaches us tolerance. We are thrust into interactions with people with whom we might disagree but still must coexist as part of “a village.”
“The village is our best arena for practicing productive disagreement and compromise—in other words, democracy,” Thompson wrote. Our aloneness might be atrophying our collective muscle of democracy.
Today, people in each party think more unfavorably of people in the other party than they did 20 years ago. In a 2021 poll by Generation Lab/Axios, nearly one-third of college-age Republicans said they wouldn’t even go on a date with a Democrat, and more than two-thirds of college-age Democratic students wouldn’t go on a date with a Republican.
// Artificial connections
In the age of AI, technology is creating human-like experiences in sometimes misleading ways. The conversational, human-like chatbots we use to interact with today’s AI algorithms can create the illusion of talking to a person. Character.ai, a company that creates AI companions (one of which was intimately connected to a teen who committed suicide last year), has millions of monthly active users who spend an average of 93 minutes per day chatting with their AI companion.
It might be strange to imagine having a romantic AI companion, but all of our texting and chatting in the privacy of our homes has predisposed us to similar experiences from AI companions.
// Still the early days of the internet
It’s worth remembering that today's dominant technologies are still new. Social media isn’t even one generation old. The mass adoption of AI tools is less than three years old. We are still in the very early days of the internet.
While large tech companies have built platforms that dominate our digital lives, a growing movement is emerging to create a new, better, more connected internet.
One small example is a business called Tin Can, which is a WiFi-enabled landline for kids. No apps, no screens, and only approved numbers get through. Kids talking to kids on a phone with a cord. It’s one example of how families and friend groups bypass the incumbent technology altogether for a new (or old) form of human connection.
Another is Front Porch Forum, a social network of neighbors in Vermont and New York. Its founder and CEO Michael Wood-Lewis told The Washington Post last year that the company “ultimately exists to stimulate real-world interactions among neighbors.” Research from New_ Public, a Project Liberty Alliance member, found that Front Porch Forum is one of the few online spaces in America that leaves its users feeling more informed, more civically engaged, and more connected to their neighbors.
A third is Cortico, a platform co-created by Deb Roy, an advisor to Project Liberty’s DSNP. Cortico’s conversation platform empowers individuals and communities to facilitate, analyze, and share small group conversations and create more diverse and representative community listening, leading to greater trust and transparency.
There’s a quote by the essayist William Gibson that says, “The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed.” This observation rings true for the internet today. It is still evolving, with its ultimate shape determined by the choices we make now. It would be a failure of imagination to assume the internet’s status quo is fixed or inevitable.
If there is a meta-takeaway, it is that humans have always found a way to reconnect and come back together. After a season of aloneness, history shows that our greatest breakthroughs are born from profound moments of unity.
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