The Great Disconnect: Rebuilding Community in a Digital Age

I’ve spent a considerable amount of my lifetime on social media. When Facebook first came out and I was moving around the country with the military, social media was a great way to stay connected to friends and family back home. When my family was stationed in the literal middle-of-nowhere, I used social media to network and find remote jobs before they were a “thing”. After my spouse retired from the military, social media was an invaluable resource in helping us bootstrap a small business that would later grow into a company that provides primary work for both of us, along with other disabled veterans and military spouses. Social media completely changed the course of my life - it facilitated connections to people and organizations that I otherwise would never have had. Reflecting back on my digital journey, I have a lot to thank social media for.

The Dark Side of Social Media

But there’s a dark side to social media. Chances are, you’ve caught a glimpse of the cesspool of negative impacts stemming from these digital interactions. People break off friendships based on something some posts online. Kids cyberbully each other with a non-stop brutality that makes our generation’s playground brawls seem downright uplifting. Foreign adversaries and terrorist groups have weaponized social media, pummeling democracies with disinformation intended to exacerbate community divisions, erode public trust, and render us impotent in all things productive and positive. Social media - the same platform that helped me build a career and keep up with my relatives back home - emerged as the modern battlefield that transcends traditional bounds and invades all our sacred spaces - service organizations, religious groups, neighborhoods, workplaces, families, and even our homes. 

For the past few years, I’ve been up to my ears in researching the weaponization of social media and trying to educate people about how they can defend against this digitized onslaught of intended destruction. My briefs have taken me all over America - from small town public libraries to the White House. In these presentations, I outline the complex threats weaponization of social media presents to our society, recommend digital literacy, and individual assessment of what’s about their life makes them particularly vulnerable to disinformation - information created and disseminated by our adversaries who wish the worst on the American people and her allies. I tell stories about backwoods snake handlers, my grandmama’s conspiracy theories, and how skill-building in the realm of cognitive security is similar to firearms safety training. 

Secretly, I hoped it would just all go away. I was discouraged by the lack of accountability and effective response at all levels when it comes to the dark side of social media. I didn’t like seeing people I knew and formerly respected in this light - indifferent, incompetent, and apathetic. I thought that perhaps our little human brains hadn’t evolved fast enough to comprehend the breadth of access that the Internet presented. Remember Dunbar’s Number? Social media greatly exceeded our 150-headcount ideal. 

My friends recently started getting off social media. We no longer “Like” each other's photos on an app. Instead, we send each other private messages, schedule calls, and try to link up whenever we’re in the same town or at the same base. I don’t get any business leads via social media anymore. I can’t even recall the last time I found an interesting new brand or organization via social media. All the good recs come through my personal networks - folks that email me the great book they just finished, or share a vacation destination I simply must go on over our monthly luncheons. I’m very into photography, and I enjoy writing, so I still use social media to share my content with a dwindling online community. After 15 years of activity on social media, my posting is habitual - kind of like writing in my journal each morning or going on an afternoon run. It’s probably more for me than anyone else, at this point. 

The Digital Tower of Babel

When I was in college, I dated the oldest son of a backwoods preacher. His parents were scandalized that he’d bring a woman of my religious background home, and insisted on my attending a tent revival they were leading, so I could be “introduced to the Spirit.” I don’t remember much about the sermons and singing that occurred during that five-hour evening under the Mississippi sky, but one thing his daddy said really stuck with me: “People are always trying to fill an empty hole in their hearts.” The hellfire and brimstone preacher said only religion could fill that hole, and described how people spend so much of their life trying to fill that hole with other things - alcohol, drugs, food, entertainment, money, sex, work. 

While I didn’t volunteer to get baptized in the cattle pond that evening, and my boyfriend opted to break it off rather than deal with his parents’ rejection, I’ve often thought about how we as humans do seem especially wired to seek a salve for some wound we can’t really define.

Is it loneliness?

An awareness of our own mortality?

A drive for meaning or significance?

My evolutionary psychologist friends tell me it’s a pre-programmed need for a group of people - a “tribe” - that helps us feel safe in a dangerous world.

Rabbis tell me it’s a thirst that is not meant to necessarily be quenched, but rather a source of motivation to tikkum olam - “repair the world”.

A lady living in a school bus parked at my favorite fishing hole told me I think too much about things that will never be answered, and recommended I spend more time marveling at the mountain scenery that surrounds us.  

Social media was a failed attempt at filling that hole. It left us unhappy, unsatisfied, and somehow, even more disconnected than when we all logged onto the Internet for the first time. The revolutionary technology that was supposed to bring us all together was used to push us all apart. It was truly a digital Tower of Babel  - a seemingly good idea that went terribly wrong. People across all generations are reducing their engagement on social media. They post and share less content, and are spending less and less time scrolling through algorithmically directed digitized dribble. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian was recently quoted as saying, “...so much of the internet is now just dead.” 

This tower is falling, and the question is: What are we going to replace it with?

Reconnection: Building Community in the Digital Age

Many of the community organizations we had before social media have dried up. 15-20 years of declining participation resulted in their final gasp. While social media wasn’t the only driving force behind the widespread dissolution of these critical entities (read Bowling Alone if you want more information on the social dismantlement in the United States), it arguably delivered one hell of a final blow. American Legion, Civitan, Junior League, Rotary - all the things my predecessors were active in - no longer exist in my community. The organizations and local events that used to bind us to one another have frayed, third spaces have disappeared, and we built an entire lifestyle off having what we want, when we want it, at the click of a button. 

Social media connected us to some things, and disconnected us from others - arguably from the things that really matter. The real challenge today isn’t how to revise Meta’s algorithm, but how to rebuild community in a Digital Age. Not an online community of “friends” you collect and never see, but a dynamic, real-world community of real people taking care of each other and investing in our collective future. We don’t have to go out and “find” this - we can create it, right where we are, with what we have to work with. Contrary to what those high-dollar social clubs tell you, it doesn’t take a lot of material resources to make a friend and invest in your community. 

While I miss the old days of social media, swapping recipes and home decor pins with my friends, I’m encouraged that our attempt at replacing the benefits of being with each other - the laughter, the tears, the highly inappropriate jokes that are beyond funny - with technology failed. We can’t artificially manufacture the feelings we get from camaraderie, shared struggles, and big bear hugs. Our Tower of Babel was a piss-poor “substitute” for all the things that make humans human, and I’m glad it’s collapsing. 

Social media taught us what really mattered by showing us all the things technology can’t fabricate. It highlighted the distinctions between man and machine, and reminds us what a gift humanity is and how we must strive to protect and preserve it. All those feelings of loneliness and disconnect that you feel aren’t ever going to be satisfied by technology. They are feelings from a reason - indicators that something needs some attention: our communities. And you’re the person tasked with critical action items to rebuild the community after the fall of the Tower. Call your friends. Schedule a lunch, hike, or walk. Take someone supper. Join civic groups. Volunteer with nonprofits. Get involved in advocacy that matters to you.  

The Great Disconnect isn’t the end of connection - it’s a reminder that community is ours to build. Now, get to it.