The Need for Smaller Communities
The pernicious effects of Big Social are wearing on society. The platforms are like cities.
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“The more men are massed together, the more corrupt they become. Disease and vice are the sure results of overcrowded cities.” — Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762
Social media has grown on society the same way cities have throughout history.
As someone who once led global social media efforts for a Fortune 500 company,1 I never thought I’d say this, but social media has outgrown its usefulness.
What was once heralded as a panacea for communication—where everyone could have a voice and companies could listen in real time—turned into a digital Tower of Babel,2 caused young people to self-doubt and self-harm,3 and have created a billionaire class without accountability.4
The Chinese ownership of TikTok is causing national security concerns,5 Elon Musk was cited as the largest spreader of misinformation on Twitter,6 and Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook is eliminating fact-checking.7
“Often an entire city has suffered because of an evil man.” — Hesiod, c. 700 B.C.
More Connections, Less Connection
Over the last decade and a half, these platforms have given us the ability to connect with anyone, anywhere in the world, instantly. People viciously voice our opinions and vilify people we neither know nor have met, blocking, trolling, and doxxing along the way.
Humans were not designed for this kind of social intercourse.
But the need to give investors and shareholders their returns was always the goal. Advertising was the solution and brands the willing dupes. They were promised reach, and reach they would have.
The sheer scale of Facebook made them thirst the digital equivalent of Super Bowl-level television advertising. And peppering social media with 30- and 60-second spots (a TV staple) they created audiences, not communities.
Corporate sins of greed, pride, and lust for eyeballs were spliced from traditional media and replanted to take root in social media. And the focus was on the media, not on the social.
I’ve been saying this for nearly 20 years, and public consciousness is finally catching up with reality.
“Today’s city is the most vulnerable social structure ever conceived by man.” — Martin Oppenheimer, 1969
Bright Lights, Big City
The promise of these new and shiny platforms, with their seemingly bottomless well of attention (or inattention, as the case may be) stood out like a shining city on a hill, calling to the poor disconnected pastoral communities.
The evolution of social media has a parallel in the development of cities. In 1917, Oswald Spengler supposed in The Decline of the West that “world history is city history.”
As humans began to congregate in cities, they built an infrastructure to support the growing populace. As the infrastructure grew, so too did the population and so did the complexity. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, approximately 83 percent of Americans live in cities.8
Ultimately, the rise of the city destroyed the smaller nomadic lifestyle of our ancestors, where groups were more tight-knit and looked out for another. The anonymity of city life meant people could be born, live, and die in the city and fewer people than ever might care.
Spengler calls out how urban life is different from the pastoral:
“The country town confirms the country, is an intensification of the picture of the country. It is the late city that first defies the land, contradicts nature, and the lines of its silhouette, denies all nature. It wants to be something different from and higher than nature. These high-pitched gables, these baroque, cupolas, spires, and pinnacles, neither are, nor desire to be, related with anything in nature.”
Size Matters
Remember the early days of any social network? It was a fun, smaller community where you knew many of the inhabitants and it truly felt like a town square.
But over time, the social platforms grow into large, cold, algorithmically-driven behemoths, with wide swaths of the public that are unknown to us.
Spengler accompanies us through the ugly evolution of the city:
“Now the old mature cities with their Gothic nucleus of cathedral, town halls, and high-gabled streets, with their old walls, towers, and gates, ringed about by the baroque growth of brighter and more elegant patricians’ houses, palaces, and hall churches, begin to overflow in all directions in formless masses, to eat into the decaying countryside with their multiplied barrack tenements and utility buildings, and to destroy the noble aspect of the old time by clearances and rebuildings.”
“Looking down from one of the old towers upon the sea of houses, we perceive in this petrification of a historic being the exact epoch that marks the end of organic growth and the beginning of an inorganic and therefore unrestrained process of agglomerations. And now, too, appears that artificial, mathematical, utterly land-alien product of a pure intellectual satisfaction in the appropriate, the city of the city architect.”
Isn’t this what has happened with the ever-growing social networks? They’ve taken us away from the cozy, caring communities that we came from.
And we’re stuck there because it’s convenient and easy. Just like in the city, where there’s a bodega on every corner, the subway is just a few blocks away, and restaurants are open all hours.
It’s too difficult to leave.
“There is no solitude in the world like that of the big city.” — Kathleen Norris, 1931
Focused Attention, Effort
The convenience of the reach of large social platforms and their audiences create a mirage that convinces us we don’t need to make as much of an effort with our networks. The algorithm will carry our messages, we think.
The reality is every relationship takes work, even when we inhabit a smaller community. In a bucolic setting like Grover’s Corners, Emily didn’t take the time to notice and appreciate the niceties of small town life.9
Humans were built for smaller communities, for cohorts of friends, family, and acquaintances, up to about 150 people, according to Dunbar.10
Whether it’s the number of direct reports or the number of people you follow on a social platform, quality is far more important than quantity. As my friend Jay Acunzo is fond of saying: Resonance, not reach.11
Effort and empathy matter more than size. That’s a fact, no matter where you live.
There’s so much to learn,
“Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another.” — Plato, c. 378 BC
Tom and Dominic from The Rest is History discuss Uruk, The World’s First City and the mother of modern urbanization, revealing the remarkable tale of its discovery, its mysterious origins, and equally enigmatic decline.
Lapham’s Quarterly is always a treasure-trove, and its issue The City offers up a bounty for netizens. Whether you get inspired by the quotes, learn something from an essayist from history or the present, find information in the well-designed charts and graphs, or fall in love with Lewis Lapham’s ability to weave data, history, and issues of the day with his beautiful prose, you’re in for a treat.
“The Big Brand Theory: Ford Motor Company Taking Content Seriously,” by Ric Dragon, Social Media Today, October 1, 2013.
“Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” by Jonathan Haidt, The Atlantic, April 11, 2022.
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt, Penguin Press. 2024.
“Bowing to authoritarianism in the gilded age of tech plutocracy,” by Joel Westheimer, The Globe and Mail, January 14, 2025.
“Supreme Court seems likely to uphold a law that could ban TikTok in the U.S. on Jan. 19” by Mark Sherman, Associated Press, January 10, 2025
“Elon Musk’s AI turns on him, labels him ‘one of the most significant spreaders of misinformation on X’” by Chris Morris, Fortune, November 19, 2024
“Meta just flipped the switch that prevents misinformation from spreading in the United States” by Casey Newton, Platformer News, January 14, 2025
“Nation’s Urban and Rural Populations Shift Following 2020 Census,” USCB press release December 29, 2022
From Thornton Wilders’ Our Town: “I didn’t realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed.”
Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships (Wikipedia)
“What is reach? What is resonance? Two revealing definitions to inform better work,” by Jay Acunzo, October 7, 2021
An excellent and needed post. One of your best. And I like the footnotes!