Searching for Global Community, Part 2

From the dial-up BBS to social media, something has gone wrong with how we socialize on the internet.

Click here to read Part 1 of this story, where I grow up in obscure text forums in the 90s, discover digital community, and watch the internet grow up into something the world can have in their pocket.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

An Uneasy Global Village on the Web

The early 2000s brought an explosion of experimentation with what could be done on the web, and nearly all of my friends from Ishar dove into software development. They companies they joined, from startups to megacorps, raced to be part of the boom as they figured out how we would work, play, buy, sell, educate, and entertain online.

The experiments with social communication were as wild as anything else. Wave after wave of social platform explored every imaginable way in which we could make it quicker and easier to do the sorts of things people do together: share, discuss, follow, show off, argue, and all the rest. It seemed like the global village was finally under construction.

Something strange happened during that couple of decades of growth. The internet became more and more convenient and pervasive, and we all got more and more constantly connected and at higher fidelity. We came to take it for granted that all information and commerce is a couple of taps away on our phones, in words, emojis, pictures, and high-resolution video. All of us now have, from an 1980's perspective, unimaginable superpowers in our pockets. And yet... many of the most popular ways that we connect and socialize with other humans using those powers feel kind of wrong.

If we've moved into a glorious era of the global village, why are we constantly talking about social media addiction, doomscrolling, digital detoxes, and getting pulled down rabbit holes of obsession, hate, and conspiracy? It doesn't feel like a village, full of possibility and human connection. Using social media doesn't feel like membership in a community.

To be less pessimistic, the shrinking of the world is truly incredible. There are indeed corners of the internet where you truly can find oases of your people.

But my experience has always been that these oases always feel fragile and limited – like the exception rather than the rule. Even platforms that start out feeling like engaging communities devolve into competitions for the fleeting attention of strangers and sources of “content” that’s more like mindless channel-surfing than discourse. And the ones that don’t embrace that model die off.

To take a few examples:

The old web bulletin board / forum format has been a mainstay of enthusiast communities, offering a lot of community features that work. As an example, for about 15 years I logged onto a forum for electronic makers and listeners before its main admin didn't want to deal with the burden. And that's often the fate of this format. The user interface doesn't translate well to mobile phones and they're a dedicated effort to setup and maintain, so few are created, and they slowly die off unless supported by an insular group of enthusiasts.

Reddit has tried to fill this niche with some success, but it's really designed more for a social news feed of highly topical, standalone "now look at this" posts rather than maintaining a cohesive community. When my music forum was trying to find a new home, Reddit felt like a huge step back and the group ended up just creating another web forum for us oldsters to haunt (shouts to the Keyosc crew).

MMO games have often been a haven for vigorous community, a bit like Ishar was in the pre-graphics days. When some old Ishar friends got into World of Warcraft and convinced me to join them, it refreshed some dormant friendships – and when I parted ways with the game, I lost touch again. And that also tends to be the shortcoming of these communities; they are so intimately tied to a particular game with a limited lifespan, and there is so much game fussiness involved in accessing them, that they never work as a purely social platform once you're done playing. Unless you get sucked into one of the surprising durable game worlds, with their very particular cultures, like Eve Online or Second Life... it's not where you're going to want to hang out and meet new people online.

Chat apps like WhatsApp offer some promise. I'm sure you've got a set of private chat groups in one (or many) of these. But these don't really go all the way either. If you've got a group of people who live in other cities, you probably swap links and happy birthdays, but the chat goes silent for long periods. When there's just that one "room" that everything goes into, getting into a lively discussion or sharing frequent updates about what you're doing can feel overbearing for a group of more than a handful of people. Chat groups don't feel rich enough to maintain a community, and there's no sensible built-in way to grow a community with members you don't already know.

As I've experimented with platform after platform over the years, nothing has recreated that real sense of satisfying, tangible community that I experienced on crude old Ishar, let alone surpassed it as we always expected the internet would. Despite being instantly connected 24/7, friends slowly drift apart other than a few messages and conversations here and there, as if we were still in the time of letters and phone calls. As I've worked in different parts of the world, really amazing and interesting people I've met say we're going to stay in touch, but there never feels like a good way to maintain the close group dynamic we had in person.

Why is this so hard?

I want to try to break it down to figure it out.

Social Media's Illusion of Community

If we fast forward through 30 years of social platform experimentation, the result today is two dominant social communication paradigms – two ways that we communicate human-to-human on the web: messaging and social media.

Messaging is the realm of things like SMS, WhatsApp, Messenger, Kakao, Telegram, Signal, WeChat, and LINE. The chats that we have there are certainly social, but going back to an earlier point, it's much less community than it is correspondence. It's all the stuff that, in an analogue age, was done by letter or phone call. We send notes, have brief chats with individuals or small groups, forward around links and memes, and "stay in touch" with people there between in-person gatherings.

Messaging is incredibly useful – a huge advance over what came before. But it's not a complete solution for all of the ways we want to socialize. It lacks the essential features of membership and participation in a wider community that we also crave.

That’s where a second paradigm has come to try to fill that need...

Social media is sustained by the community urge – it has become our "global village". Going by user numbers, apps like Instagram, Facebook, Tiktok, Snapchat, Threads, Twitter (I'm not calling it X), and Reddit dominate how people gather together in groups online. But despite the global popularity and many options, it's a struggle to find real community there.

Now it might seem ridiculous to say that the internet lacks community. When you're obsessively checking half a dozen social media apps, too much community might seem like the real problem. But I believe what we've ended up with is an illusion of community that absorbs all of our mental space for community socialization online while delivering something else.

Many times social media platforms launched on the promise of community – and maybe even delivered it early on. The basic concept of myspace, facebook, twitter, flickr, instagram and many more was this: connect with your friends, share what you're doing with those friends, and let them react. It's an appealing idea: on a single global platform, communities can emerge by people following each other, and they can all pop in to see what's going on with each other, discuss things, collaborate, and so forth.

But we have ended up using social media in practice isn't that. Usually we open the app and scroll through a feed. Maybe that feed has a little bit from your friends, but mostly you see content created by personalities and companies, either those you’ve followed or those served up algorithmically. Many social media apps started with the ability to see "just updates from friends" or to great little private sub-groups, but they've all drifted away from those options and have locked onto the feed as what you should be doing, and what's easiest to do. The latest apps like TikTok have fully embraced that approach, putting all of their tech into creating the most compelling feed possible so you there's always another surprisingly-relevant thing for you to burn a few more seconds on.

That's a very different dynamic from being a member of a community that gathers in the town square. We feel more like a faceless viewer in an audience of billions rather than a contributing and known community member.

What happened? We all have a deep need for real community, and we know the internet provides us with the tech to do it online. So why are we all mostly just scrolling through feeds of influencers and content creators who don't care who we are beyond our likes and follows?

There's a very long story for another day here about the underlying forces that got us here; I've come to believe it's part of the greatest shift in society since the printing press. But setting aside those reasons for now, the main problem with social media is this:

In a true community, all members are peers. While there may be differences in status or reputation or authority, the primary dynamic of interaction in a true community is communication, sharing, collaboration, and contribution among members whose individual identities are important.

Instead, the primary dynamic of interaction on social media is broadcast. In any interaction, you're either a broadcaster or you're the audience; the content creator or the content consumer; the one going for the likes or the one giving them. Rather than solving the problem of creating communities online, social media has ended up fully focused on democratizing access to global broadcast at a scale that previously was reserved for giant private or state-owned TV/radio stations, publishers, studios, and other entities with the means of distributing content to millions.

It is of course a revolutionary thing that the power of broadcast is no longer reserved for the few and the powerful – it's now available to all of us if we want it. But humanity has never had that power before, and we're discovering that a model of socialization that centers on millions of broadcasters gives the surface appearance of global community – a global village – while actually creating a very different result for us as individuals, and for the society we live in.

Maybe you've felt the effects of how this democratized broadcast dynamic has a strong community-like pull, but results in something much less satisfying. We can list out examples of what we need from real community, and what we get on social media instead:

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Membership

We want to belong within a community, where we become known for who we are as we participate and contribute and a sense that we know (or can know) the other members of our community.

Social media promises membership not just in own personal communities of friends but the largest community possible – the global village. The FOMO of what the world is talking about is intense.

But on social media, the only mechanism of membership we have is the "follow" – to become part of a broadcaster’s audience. That means that the only sense of belonging social media delivers is the feeling of being one of many following the content creator(s). The broadcaster has to power to define the pseudo-community, its values, and its culture, and membership is contingent on echoing those values and culture. It replaces a sense of familiarity and fellowship with something even more primal: leader worship.

Reputation

We want to become known within our community and develop some status or respect, to become known for the uniqueness of our interests, skills, or just eccentricities. We also expect to have an opinion of the reputation of the other various members in our community because we know them and they matter to us. Reputation just happens naturally for all members.

Social media seems to provide a forum for us to present, day by day or minute by minute, a picture of who we are – to become known by a global community.

But in social media's broadcast model, your reputation is your content. Being known to an audience-community is only available to the broadcaster who gets views and follows. Reputation can only be earned with engagement, and if you're not a natural (and successful) exhibitionist you're left to be an anonymous follower of what everybody else is doing.

Meaningful forms of reputation like respect and credibility are replaced by raw popularity – how many followers and likes you've got. Your reputation is that you're an influencer with a tribal following or you're nobody.

Competition

We want to have the opportunity to show off our talents and abilities a bit, to add to our reputation by demonstrating that we're the best at something within our community. If you have a competitive streak, what could be more exciting than competing on a global scale with everyone on social media?

Social media provides a “community” in the form of a global audience that only knows you by your ability to draw engagement, and very few can achieve anything that draws that engagement when competing on a global scale. Worse even than the old broadcast era's urge to win your 15 minutes of fame, there is a constant pressure to win fame by capturing the attention of a global audience for that critical few seconds – in every post, by any means necessary. Simply being known as the one who's pretty good at something within a group of people you care about is lost in the global feed, and you're left feeling mediocre.

Sharing

We want a forum to share our experiences, creations, ideas, fears, and all the other things that add up to our lives. Sharing within a community of people we care about gives us a sounding board, a source of comfort or encouragement, a place to find accountability, and a source of valuable feedback from those who know you. It encourages discussion, understanding, and closeness.

Social media thrives on providing tools for frictionless, constant sharing. It promises that you can easily create a constant connection with your friends while your ideas can spread further and your creativity can find its fan base.

But in the social media broadcast model, every share is pushed into the same pipeline of engagement-driven content. It's difficult or impossible to share specific things contextually with the right set of people, and everything is depersonalized and reduced to something that exists to get a quick like as people scroll by. It feels like your only options are either performing an exaggerated life, set of opinions, and creative output that triggers the algorithm and chases the latest trends – or else have it all be irrelevant to share with anyone.

Collaboration

We want real community that gives us access to a pool of potential collaborators and a place in which to explore and create and build together closely.

Social media feels like the ideal place to find like-minded collaborators wherever they might be.

The foundation of collaboration is building up familiarity and trust, which flourishes naturally in real community, but is nearly impossible to create in the broadcast/audience social media model. Everything you post has to already be clickworthy and monetization-ready, and the natural mode is dog-eat-dog not collaborative.

Contribution

We want fulfillment by finding ways to contribute to and support our community and its members – to give back, and to improve.

Social media seems to offer a global forum to contribute to the most important causes.

In reality, when broadcast and engagement are the only available forms of participation, the only form of contribution you're left with is "raising awareness". The only thing that seems to have impact is to seek the viral feedback loop of rapidly amplifying the latest cause that is attracting attention within the tribal "community" that we inhabit. And when you’re competing for impact via clicks, only simple absolutes rise to the top, encouraging a kind of exaggerated performative contribution – usually in the form of easily re-shared outrage, ridicule, and echoing tribal values.

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In short, rather than bring community into the digital age, social media has invented something new using the newly-possible democratized broadcaster-audience technology. It’s a form of global social interaction where you’re either a broadcaster competing with millions of others for engagement, or you’re the audience scrolling content as if clicking the remote control on a TV with millions of potential channels, each one only showing the highlights.

As an audience member, it’s channel-surfing that pushes our brain’s community buttons. Social media is inherently impersonal, but the feed presents us with content tuned to feel like it’s just for us. We may not know the content creator or almost anybody else liking or posting a quick comment, but it provides a zero-effort satisfaction of that urge to be part of the group. And even if the content is broadcast to millions, because it’s created by individuals rather than centralized broadcasters, it feels more like authentic personal 1-to-1 communication.

But Why?

If we can see that social media gives us a poisoned illusion of the community we really want, why aren't there alternatives – or at least why aren't they more popular? Democratized broadcast certainly has its place, but why has it so completely coopted our need for real community?

As I've searched for answers in my quest for community online, I've realized that the root cause isn't as simple as badly designed platforms or evil social media CEOs.

I think we're seeing the internet unleashing a fundamental and irresistible transition in society that hasn't been seen since the invention of the printing press. As the guy who coined "global village" put it: the medium is the message. The internet, and social media, gives humanity a new and immensely powerful medium that is nearly unlimited in the communication it enables, and we're seeing what happens when that global-scale power is opened up to human beings with a village-scale desire for belonging and status. And then there's that desire for profit too...

There's much more to say about this transition, its effects, and its historical precedents – but that's a story for another day. For now, maybe we can all just be a little more aware of what real community means and try to seek it out where we can – online or not. And maybe we can scroll through the feed a bit less, if we recognize its FOMO siren song and see what it isn't giving us in return.