Remember when you’d get to work (or school), and the first thing you’d do was catch up with your pals on THE THING. It was an episode of the show. Or the game. Or the big news that happened over the weekend. It was a shared story, and while you and your friends might have fixated on different story points or were each enthralled by different details, the common thread had captured each of you.
It doesn’t happen anymore. Not like it used to.
I’ve had conversations with friends about politics of all things – literally the subject I cover in media – and have been totally lost. A friend will bring up a detail about some SCOTUS decision or some kid of some politician or some scandal somewhere and it’s like they’re speaking a different language.
How can we possibly be living in the same world? I mean, come on. I’m perpetually online (and not in a good way, I admit). How could a non-political, non-media person know something I don’t?
Brian Daitzman, Editor-in-Chief of The Intellectualist, says that our common culture functionally ended around 1999.
He wrote about it last week on his popular and engrossing Substack, and I had to talk to him about it (finally, an article we had in common!).
The thing is, this kind of silo-ing has impacts far beyond culture. What is a democracy except a system of collaborative decision-making? What happens when we don’t even a fundamental understanding of the problems we collectively face – not even with the people with whom we agree?
What happens? Well … you’re living it now.
Watch this conversation and leave your thoughts in the comments.
