Have Our Online Lives Eroded Our Communities?

I'm a little embarrassed to admit that it's only in the last month or so I finally discovered The Financial Diet, "the place where (hopefully) you will start talking about money for the first time in a way that doesn’t feel scary, judgmental, or boring as hell."

Mostly, I listen to site founder Chelsea Fagan in her YouTube videos, in the mornings while I prepare my lunches. Her millennial's-eye view has been something I needed while I navigate life on my own in a world that no longer matches my boomer mother's filter on Depression-era wisdom such as "find a man who will take care of you."

Fagan caught my ear last month, in particular, with a video essay entitled "The Life You Want Costs $11,694/Month," because it wasn't so much about the financial aspect of modern life in America as it was about what she called "the replacement of community with consumerism."

The essay focused on six major, lucrative, largely technology-driven shifts in Western society, all affecting our current loneliness epidemic: dating apps, the pet care industry, the childcare industry, the death of labor unions and the rise of the gig economy, and social media.

All six, she said, are part of the "many, many for-profit industries [which] have popped up to replace roles that used to be people we knew and loved."

Exacerbating this problem: the elimination of "third spaces" where we could meet people, such as restaurants and diners, coffee shops and cafes, gyms or fitness centers, local markets and corner stores, bookstores, barber shops and hair salons. Samantha Dalton, a licensed clinical social worker, cited additional factors including the aftereffects of COVID-19 lockdowns, work from home culture, the manosphere, and self-help "toxicity."

Fagan concluded: "And it's undeniable that the transition of everything from dating to political organizing to communicating between friends, moving almost exclusively to social media has had a serious impact on the amount of time we're actually building community/meaningful connections IRL."

Following last month's post on whether communities could step up if FEMA went away, I couldn't help wondering: could the kind of consumerism Fagan described extend to disaster response?

What we mean when we talk about community

"For most of the 20th century, a lot of our social glue came bundled with institutions, churches and synagogues, unions, civic clubs, fraternal organizations, neighborhood associations... the automatic gathering structures that many people relied on, not just for seeing people in day-to-day life, but also very, very real financial material and practical necessities," Fagan explained. "Community with which you made food and raised children and threw parties and borrowed money and traded skills and basically every other aspect of day-to-day life."

Hillary Clinton may have gotten a lot of flak for coopting the African proverb "It takes a village to raise a child," but fundamentally, said Fagan, "...a village is not just, well, I have like three people that I'm friends with and that I know I can hang out with and invite to things and and talk to if I'm sad.

"A village is a layered experience. A village is, I have family or chosen family that I feel I can rely on. I have friends that I can reach out to. I have neighbors that I'm familiar with. I have co-workers that I know and am familiar with.... It's about looking at your geographical area and saying, "How do I build different layers of relationships in this area around me so that I have different layers of people to go through when I do need help?"

In one excellent example of mutual aid, Fagan referenced a client whose neighbors came together to form a daycare. "They came together and they would switch off days. Some people had flexibility and some stay-at-home moms were able to be like, 'No, like I could take two days. Like that's okay with me.' And they they hashed that out that way.

"That is a village. A village is about having multiple layers of people that you can be creative with problem solving with."

(Not for nothing: this concept hit home for me as a neurodivergent, reading a poignant Medium piece by Rahmat Ahmadi: "My Afghan Grandmother Solved What ADHD Experts Couldn’t." In it, he described her wisdom: "In Afghanistan, we never expected one person to remember everything. Uncle Farid knew school schedules. Aunt Mariam planned meals. Your grandfather handled transportation. I organized, but never carried everything alone.... Why you think you must do everything yourself? Your brain is different, not broken.")

How we undermined our own sense of community

The "automatic gathering structures" Fagan described, she said, "were not perfect places, but they created built-in rituals, weak tie networks, and places to show up without a cover charge."

But those imperfections magnified as people began to understand more about mental health, boundaries, and trauma; as Fagan put it, "maybe I was raised with these values but I don't know if these are the values I still want to have."

As a result, people could feel less of a sense of belonging not only in religious communities, but also in unions, associations, and other groups, knowing "that that wasn't a space that worked for them anymore and shifted away from that for better or for worse."

As people began to move away from hometowns, towards jobs, or other factors driving migration, she said, "Families were no longer staying together. Families were physically splitting up whether because they wanted to or because they felt it was best for them."

Memberships in community groups declined, too, and "people lost a ready-made schedule for being with others" – one that hasn't been replaced, at least not in our physical realities. For example, talking about childcare, Fagan pointed out "the issue of fewer and fewer family or community members who can take care of those kids."

At one time, she observed, humans lived intergenerationally, "either under the same roof or in the same very small communities until very recently." But now, seniors, many of whom live at a distance from grandchildren or are just as wage-squeezed as their children, are logistically unable to help care for children.

"Now, most of the default places to regularly see other humans will ask for a tab or a membership... our social time is getting constantly monetized." This monetization in bars, nightclubs, health clubs, and private members clubs "turns casual community time into a monthly line item in your budget," Fagan said.

Free options like libraries and parks, she added, still exist, but funding and access are "very uneven and they can't always absorb the role that churches or civic halls once played."

"In short," said Fagan, "if you want consistent structured togetherness, you are often paying for the room."

Building paradise in hell will not be monetized

(Okay, maybe it will be. So much else already has been, and disasters are nothing if not magnets for opportunistic greed. But I wanted to play on the 1971 poem "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," which made the same point as Fagan's essay and Solnit's book: we must be active participants in rebuilding our communities.)

Naturally, many people are opting out of "paying for the room" in which to gather. Individual and family budgets have been tightening for years now, and lingering lockdown anxiety can't be understated.

Besides, we have what looks to be a ready-made substitute: social media, which in some ways, Fagan said, "has come to replace nearly everything we used to rely on actual human contact to provide. Updates from our friends, political engagement, or at least the illusion of it, social invitations, etc. are all filtered through news feeds, which are designed to keep us scrolling but not connecting."

For example, Fagan said:

"...liking a friend's post about an accomplishment feels like a satisfactory substitute for actually reaching out and congratulating them. Even seeing updates from their life makes it feel like we've connected with them in any way when often we can see it without having actually spoken to them in years.

"Commenting or resharing a news story about politics gives a similar feeling in our brains to having actually done something productive to help the political cause or situation. And even things like participating in often fear-mongering social apps like the neighborhood one give us all the suspicion of tight-knit community living without actually in many cases even knowing our neighbors' names."

It's hard for me to comment on these kinds of trends personally. By the time Helene struck, I'd long since deleted my Facebook and Twitter accounts. I only heard secondhand about the information and misinformation swirling around, say, FEMA's $750 individual assistance payouts.

Once upon a time, though, my Extremely Online presence led me to post and repost all sorts of things in the name of "involvement," much like Fagan describes. Over time, realizing my own limited capacity to verify links and photos I saw (in addition to other factors), my "involvement" dwindled. (Read more in Magen Cubed's excellent essay "Living in Public and Other Modern Agonies".)

So I can see how people's eagerness to reshare or comment on a story can, obviously, contribute to the spread of misinformation about disaster effects and assistance – and in turn, exacerbate the distance between neighbors and community members.

With this distance, we might be more inclined to reach out to strangers online to fulfill our immediate needs for connection. Said Fagan:

"...it's lovely to know that if you're living in California, there's somebody in Florida going through the same thing as you... it's somebody that you text with, maybe you talk on the phone with, maybe you FaceTime with, but there's still this missing element of feeling that you have people in your immediate circle that you can rely on."

That missing element, she believes, is the result of social media's business model: "to falsely replace community in ways that keep us hooked on the apps," i.e. to monetize our lives, i.e. a transaction. "Keeping our attention, selling our data, and influencing our purchases at the end of the funnel are the actual profit motives of social media," she observed.

Community takes vulnerability. Vulnerability takes risk. Can we?

What this potentially means for post-disaster purchasing decisions is for another blog – could "disaster influencers" be far off? – because for now, I want to focus on the harm of transactionalism in our interactions.

"Influencers replacing friends, comment sections replacing actual conversations, and just passively watching or at most resharing something instead of doing something," in Fagan's words, limit people's ability to get to know us.

The less people know us, of course, the less able they are to be able to help us. And the more we post(ure) as who we want to be rather than as who we are (do we even know that much?) the harder it is for us to ask for help when we really need it – when we're "off brand," human rather than social mediaites.

Fagan's emphasis was on loneliness rather than disaster response and recovery, but in my experience, the two go hand in hand. The less connected you feel, the harder time you have seeking, asking for, and receiving help – or for that matter, responding to requests and giving help.

Of course, people knowing our strengths involves people seeing us; likewise people seeing what we need help with.

All involve tremendous vulnerability, which for many of us, feels deeply threatening. Shamed for having needs, expressing our needs in manner deemed unacceptable, or being insensitive to others' needs, we shrink, retreat, and silence ourselves.

Little wonder "connecting" with someone similar halfway around the country (or world) feels safer.

And yet.

A village is about having multiple layers of people that you can be creative with problem solving with.

"The more people know us and truly know us, the less we feel the need to perform for them," Fagan said. "And one person's true acceptance and presence is worth a thousand empty validations.... It is not putting us out to say that we owe people the best of ourselves when we are able to give it.

"But the reality is keeping us separate is very profitable.... And the answer is taking more of an interest in each other, stepping outside ourselves, going to places, showing up, meeting people, forming connections, collectively acting."

Not that any of this activity is easy. After Hurricane Helene, I remember seeing more of my neighbors in the roadway, walking dogs, talking to one another. I met a woman from up the street who seemed like someone I might like to be friends with. But after power was restored, so too our routines. Every time I saw her thereafter, she was deeply ensconced on her phone.

Dalton noted that the effort involved in (re)building community can feel overwhelming to people who rely on technology to manage life. "...there is this self-help engine over here telling them, well, if something is asking you to push yourself, that's asking too much of you," she said, naming the tension between legitimate personal boundaries that keep us safe, and the necessary softening of boundaries that allow us to form human relationships.

I suspect I might have an easier time forming bonds with my neighbors if I joined them in their churches, which itself feels like more than I can handle – going back to Fagan's earlier points about people's shifting values and belief systems, their sense of belonging or lack thereof.

In a lot of ways I think emergency management is my "way in"; a set of skills I can build to respond in ways my neighbors need that will enable me to show up effectively for them, when my effectiveness is limited in childcare or home rebuilding or other tangible, useful skills. It's my way of being intentional, I guess, with my time and energy and social inclinations.

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