The Intimate World and the Remote World
We are over-invested in relating to strangers
Before smart phones and social media, we experienced the intimate world separately from the remote world. The intimate world is your family, friends, and co-workers. The remote world is celebrities, politicians, and other famous people.
When I was growing up, my contact with the remote world was through television and magazines. These media gave us the sense that famous people lived apart from the rest of us. Meanwhile, the people of our intimate world lived with us and were like us. They were not on display.
The smart phones and social media changed that. On our little screens, celebrities act like our friends, and our friends act like celebrities.
Donald Trump succeeded in having both a celebrity presence and a close-friend presence for many people. Other politicians have had difficulty doing so. Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden did not try to be relaxed and informal. Kamala Harris aspired to do so (or at least some of her advisers got their hopes up), but she failed to make it work.
Online connectivity enables individuals to forge tribes with ideological allies across the world, while paradoxically spending more time in solitude. This technological leapfrogging, combined with declining face-to-face interaction, has ruptured both local and national boundaries.
…‘Virtue-signalling’ occurs online precisely because social media has become our primary point of social contact. Status is now acquired in digital popularity - likes, retweets and followers. And even if others dislike my tweets, my actual behaviour remains invisible.
…During recent human history, ideological persuasion has operated at two levels. Within villages, social conformity was maintained through local surveillance - we sought the approval of neighbours and relatives who monitored our conduct. Modern states then wielded a homogenising influence through mass education, censorship boards and state media.
Now, she point out, we can attach ourselves to an online community, where we escape from having an identity and obligations that might otherwise come from the world of our friends, family, and co-workers. We also can more easily resist the norms propagated by government and elites.
We’ve always used communication technologies to reveal ourselves to others. But by blurring conversation and broadcasting, social media takes this usually benign process to an unhealthy extreme. Facebook, Instagram, X, and other platforms have been painstakingly designed to encourage constant self-expression. By emphasizing quantitative measures of social status—follower and friend counts, like and retweet tallies—the platforms reward people for broadcasting endless details about their lives and opinions through messages and posts, photos and videos. In the physical world, we remain present even when we’re quiet. In the virtual world, we don’t. To shut up, even briefly, is to disappear. To confirm our existence, we have to keep posting. We have to keep repeating Here I am!
…feelings of overexposure often leave us feeling stressed and anxious. They can also poison our attitudes toward others. As much psychological research has shown, we tend to like people whom we sense to be similar to us and dislike those who seem dissimilar. When we’re constantly inundated with a lot of stray bits of information about other people, as we are when we’re online, we start giving more weight to evidence of dissimilarity than similarity — a phenomenon the Harvard social psychologist Michael Norton calls a “dissimilarity cascade.” More information triggers antipathy.
…We communicate best when we communicate thoughtfully and judiciously, when we pause to listen, when we don’t rush to make snap judgments or to react with an imprudent message. If we’re going to temper the ill effects of social media, we’re going to have to back away from the screen and reacquaint ourselves with the intimate art of real conversation. We’re going to need to spend less time broadcasting and more time talking.
I can easily see a trend toward less and less connection with the intimate world. Consider the following: work from home; less religious attendance; lower rates of marriage and family formation; more urbanization; more migration.
At the same time, I can see people drawn further and further into the remote world of their screens. Artificial intelligence will seem more personal. Virtual reality will become better at blending into our lives.
So far, as Evans and Carr point out, the remixing of the intimate world and the remote world has made our social lives more brittle. Our insecurities have been magnified. Our fears and animosities have been strengthened.
Going forward, I believe we need to find ways to regenerate the intimate world. If we look around, the healthiest, happiest people tend to be connected with another as families, neighbors, and religious adherents. Once you notice that, you should adjust your aspirations accordingly.
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"When I was growing up, my contact with the remote world was through television and magazines. These media gave us the sense that famous people lived apart from the rest of us. Meanwhile, the people of our intimate world lived with us and were like us. They were not on display."
That's not quite right, the roots go back a long time. The perceptions of expanding gap-bridging were already in motion with mass radio broadcast which could be heard in the intimate surroundings of groups together in the family home, consider FDR's "fireside chats".
But from the earliest days of television - around two thirds of a century ago now - it was recognized that moving recurrent fictional series involving developed characters onto the screen was an enormous advance in the direction of temporarily simulated emotions of intimacy, familiarity and inclusion, in which members of the audience could be made to feel more like the quiet member of the group than a mere spectator. It's not just that temporary "suspension of disbelief" one experiences when allowing the full mental transportation into the world and cosmology of a work of fiction, it's much more - the feeling as if one might be involved as a character oneself, of your own life progressing in line with their lives.
When people watched "Leave it to Beaver", they would vaguely and subconsciously feel part of the family. Hit comedy shows like Cheers and Friends and Seinfeld were crafted, arranged, and presented specifically to try to maximize the sense that one was just another friend on a couch. patron at the bar, or for various kinds of small-group-based procedural dramas, another member of the team. In Star Trek, it's like you're an ensign on the crew, or maybe you're an assistant prosecutor on Law and Order, and so forth. Notice the small modal number of characters. People came to "know" the lives of these characters better than they knew about the lives of their most intimate relations in the physical world.
The internet, social media, smartphones, and content streamable on demand were certainly multiple additional quantum leaps ahead of all that, especially given the possibility of interaction and the levelling of the modes of interaction such that one sees the presented lives of friends and celebrities in the same format. Nowadays the virtual has completely hollowed out the real, physical reality both can't compete, and it's far too much of a hassle to try to make it work.
Yes! Yes! Yes!
Near the end of his life, Raoul Naroll, an anthropologist who specialized in cross-cultural studies, published "The Moral Order: An Introduction to the Human Situation" (Sage 1983). It was the first of three volumes he had planned to write in which he synthesized the last quarter of a century of work in cross-cultural study. While was unable to complete the other volumes, this first one introduced the concept of a moralnet, by which he simply meant the smallest level of social organization beyond the so-called nuclear family. The hunting and foraging band is the prototypical moralnet; within larger-scale societies we have the extended family. Most generally, such a group of kinfolk and friends is a necessary level of social organization in the large societies most of us we live in. Moralnets, Naroll’s research indicates, seem weakest in industrialized societies.
I say more about moral nets in a long post at New Savanna: Thriving, Jiving, and Jamming Among Friends and Family, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2021/08/thriving-jiving-and-jamming-among.html
That post, in turn, became the introductory chapter to a small collection of essays I put together with Charlie Keil, an ethnomusicologist best known for "Urban Blues" (Chicago 1966). Our book is called "Playing for Peace: Reclaiming Our Human Nature." Here's the Amazon link: https://tinyurl.com/22hhjyaq That book is, in effect, about music and dance as vehicles for sustaining the intimate world.