The Breakdown of the Shared Experience

Our connection is helping to drive us apart

I don’t think anyone has ever explained culture to me properly. When I was a child, I thought to be cultured meant you went to the ballet, or you visited art museums. Perhaps when you visited a new city, you went down some poky little ally to shops that sold strange trinkets.

the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively

The definition above is from the Oxford English Dictionary. If you say ‘culture’ I think most people (at least I did) think immediately of the first two words “the arts”. I think the second part of the definition gets overlooked “human intellectual achievement regarded collectively”. There are often items in the media about clashes of culture. I have no great insight and certainly no expertise in this area. All I can offer are a few observations from my perspective which have come to mind recently.

In a comparatively short space of time there have been some big changes in cultural interaction, and as a global society, we are not dealing with this very well.

If we go back to the very beginning of society, our hunter-gather predecessors coalesced into groups or tribes. They had common goals and a pretty simple list of priorities. Forage, grow or hunt enough food. Find or make adequate shelter. Protect their young and the tribe from predators and other tribes. As people grew up and passed on their knowledge to the next generation, there was a common experience and these tribes developed their own way of doing things and societal norms. They developed their own culture.

Simplifying greatly, some of these groups formed bigger groups and were ruled over by one person or one form of government, if you fast forward, you have the emergence of the modern nation state. These nations had a shared cultural identity. Generally speaking, the people shared a common ancestry, spoke the same language, worshipped the same god or gods, ate the same cuisine, etc. These nations did trade and, of course go to war with one another, but for the vast majority of the population they would have very little if any contact with those of other cultures. This shared culture could be very powerful, inspiring a fierce loyalty to one’s leader or to one’s country. This could be exploited (and was) for good or bad.

People also had shared beliefs, political persuasions or interests with those in other countries. But until fairly recently, they would have found it hard to make contact with those like-minded individuals around the globe. Modern communication and the internet has made this possible. Name any interest, however bizarre, and I can almost guarantee you there will be at least one website and an online community devoted to it. This ability to bring people with shared interests together from around the world was much lauded in the early days of the internet.

If you really boil it down, you would probably find that you have more in common with people spread out all over the world than your next-door neighbour, or your peer group at school, or your work colleagues. The ability to connect with them is empowering and liberating. The downside of this is it is just as easy for amateur flower arrangers to connect as it is for Neo Nazis around the world to find each other. There will always be bad eggs, that is just part of the human condition.

Something else which has happened a bit more recently is the rise of streaming services. I was never one to watch a lot of TV, but there would be a few things I watched every week and good movies when they were on. One thing about broadcast TV is you have to watch it when it is on. Yes, you can record it, but most of the time people watch it at the time of broadcast. This gives you something to talk about at the water cooler the next day. Otherwise, all you might have in common with the person from the other side of the office is a mutual contempt for your employer. There is much less of this shared media consumption now. Everything is on demand. This is great, you can watch or listen to whatever you want whenever you want and you only have to consume the things that interest you.

Now we get to the problem. There is no cross pollination. I don’t catch the end of the program which was on before the one I want to watch and think, oh, actually that was quite interesting, I’ll watch that next week. I can easily access my particular niche, so that is where I go, where I feel comfortable and where I stay. We are being siloed into our own echo chambers. Everyone harps on about the algorithms. They feed us what we want and they force us into these silos. I would argue though this was happening with modern forms of communication before recommendation algorithms matured into what they are today. This siloing of our collective experience makes us easy prey for those who want to manipulate us and makes it considerably easier to radicalise us. We have always been somewhat siloed, but at least there was generally more common ground.

So what is the answer? We need to regulate people’s use of the internet and what they can say online. Restrict who they can communicate with. We need to put a firewall around the country and the government decides what is allowed to pass through this. If someone in a particular silo says something which we don’t like, we need to obliterate it. While we are at it we should start telling people what is in their best interest to think. Great, problems solved.

If you believe this, then go and live in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). It can’t be that bad. I mean they have ‘democratic’ in the name of the country after all.

No. The answer is to break out of your echo chamber just once in a while, embrace some cross pollination. While I was writing this piece, I came across a post on Nostr by the amazing Lyn Alden:

Good evening.

With today’s increasingly decentralized media landscape, it’s important to actively avoid being drawn into any one echo chamber.

What person or platform have you actively decided to listen to because you *disagree* with them, this week?

If you haven’t heard of Lyn Alden it is well worth checking out her work at lynalden.com. She also has a new book out called “Broken Money”. I haven’t read it yet, but it looks great.

Anyway, this is hard and people are generally lazy. They don’t like doing this, it scares them and makes them feel conflicted about things. That’s ok, you are allowed to feel conflicted about issues, it’s part of being human. If you can see both sides of the issue, you can take a far more nuanced and constructive position.

Each and every one of us shares 99.9 percent of our DNA. We have far more in common than we might think. Every so often, remember what we have achieved collectively.