The context is the message
Feb 26, 2023
The moment we are born, we are placed in a context that we have absolutely no control over. We do not get to choose our parents, where we were born, the belief systems held by the people around us, etc. The contexts that we come from and the environments that we spend our time in inevitably dictate who we are and who we become. How has our environment / context shaped us and the ways in which we relate to one another? How can we use these insights to inform the world we create next?
I grew up as an only child in the rural suburbs of New Jersey. Everything and everyone was fairly dispersed, and it almost always required a car to venture out of the home. This paired with having been raised by a single working mom meant that I had a lot of alone time and frequently spent time outdoors looking for ways to spend my time. The low population density meant that the pool of people that I had the opportunity to socialize with was restricted almost entirely to my classmates in school. This pool of people didn't change much—I graduated high school with the same set of people that I started elementary school with. I had a relatively small group of friends, and we were all very close to one another. The size of the available community and the distance that we had between us outside of school heavily influenced the dynamics of our relationships and how close we were to one another.
I have been living and working in New York City for almost four years now, and I have been reflecting on how the alternate levels of population density / proximity have affected my relationships with others. Beyond the thin walls of my apartment building are a number of other apartments, each with completely different worlds inside of them. My desk overlooks a street where I see a constant stream of people walking by, and on the other side of the street lie a series of buildings where I can clearly see around 20 alternate apartment windows. Each apartment reveals glimpses of movement, alternate levels of fluorescent lights and houseplants. There is a man playing online chess, a child picking his nose, and the old lady who spends hours every day watching the street with her dog, and so on. There are so many people out there, and they all have lives that are just as intricate as my own. The density of people in urban areas has given us access to people that we would never have met otherwise. Due to the unfortunate scarcity of time, however, we are forced to be very intentional about how and with whom we choose to spend our time. The increase in available options for social interaction has created a general feeling of distance, mistrust towards strangers, and has led to a disposability of relationships. While our communities are a bit more fragmented, we are exposed to more culture, art, and have more opportunity to find the people that we’d like to spend our time with.
The increase in options available to us for social interaction has increased dramatically with the proliferation of the internet and has the potential to amplify the best and worst qualities mentioned above. Dating apps and social media products have given us a constant stream of new people for us to interact with and have shifted the ways in which we connect with them even further. It is easier to discard relationships, because there is always another person one swipe away. We are forced to think about people in terms of whether or not “they are the best we can do.”
Interestingly, the same forces that created the division between the suburbs and cities seem to be happening on the internet as well. People will always go where the opportunities exist—better friends, art, access to professionals within a given domain, etc. Similarly to a rural / suburban environment, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter all started out as social networks centered on connecting with your friends. As the networks grew and ad-based monetization strategies were put into effect, the feeds on these apps shifted the emphasis away from content that your friends posted and moved increasingly towards an emphasis on entertainment. We are now constantly peering into the windows of others lives. As more and more of our lives move to the digital realm it is inevitable for our collective experience to be closer to that of a city where a sense of community + trust have been fragmented. If we are not intentional about maintaining spaces for deep connection + nature, I worry that they will slowly be forgotten. Now that the Instagrams of the internet have become cities, a select few must venture off to create new communities from scratch, taking the learnings from our past experiences with us.
The differences between these environments are not necessarily better or worse than one another, they just position us to have different sets of influences. As we collectively create the future, I hope that we make sure to be mindful about how our environments, physical or digital, shape our experiences so that we can pull the best elements from each and intentionally create a world that feels more deeply interconnected with the people around us and nature.