A Time to Build by Yuval Levin

Author:Yuval Levin [LEVIN, YUVAL]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2020-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

THE SIMPLEST IRONY OF THE ERA OF SOCIAL MEDIA IS THAT THE platforms intended to help people come together have often pulled us apart. If any single term can describe the ethos of our time, the very age in which social media has flowered, it would be isolation. In some important respects, this has been an age of isolation not despite but because of social media.

Part of the reason for this is that the idea of connection at the heart of social media tends to be thin and ephemeral. It offers a form of connection that consists of quick, momentary communication rather than relationships of mutual dependence. Indeed, this is true of how the internet more generally has tended to reshape various kinds of human connection. E-commerce tends to offer us convenience and efficiency by eliminating the need for various kinds of human interaction and connection. It enables us to shop without seeing or speaking to anyone, and so to be left alone while getting what we want or need. Some of the most distinct innovators in the tech sector (like Uber, Airbnb, WeWork, and others) create opportunities for temporary, on-demand choices that enable us to avoid enduring commitments to standing institutions. We just use what we need when we need it and move on, and our interactions with service providers are very limited.

Snapchat offers the epitome of this approach in the realm of social media—allowing users to send messages that quickly disappear once they are viewed. But Twitter has much the same effect. Even Facebook offers relationships of pure communication among disembodied profiles rather than of connection with other individuals. In such a realm, we can hear and be heard but we rarely really talk to people.

One problem with this way of interacting is that it leaves many of us with the sense that our social lives do not allow us to engage very deeply with anyone. We all want desperately to be known by the people in our lives—to be understood, sympathized with, related to, and appreciated. But the more that we subcontract our relationships to these forms of mediation that flatten our interactions, the fewer opportunities we have to be truly known, even by friends, and to know other people. The sense of being connected but lonely, in touch but untouched, is pervasive in the age of social media, and it is hard to overcome on the platforms.4

Not only who but what we know can be dangerously constrained by social media. Among the most valuable benefits of living in society is the miracle of serendipitous learning: finding ourselves exposed to knowledge or opinion or wisdom or beauty that we did not seek out and would never have known to expect. This kind of experience is not only a way to broaden our horizons and learn about the ways and views of others, it is also an utterly essential component of what we might call socialization. Being constantly exposed to influences we did not choose is part of

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