Physical Presence Develops Sense of Community

Everything about our development of technology seems to have driven people inside and away from interacting with one another.

Houses were once built with front porches so people could socialize in the summertime. We still see the reminder of a different time in the homes in our communities that were built 100 years or more ago. However, many now reflect our inward movement with their once open porches turned into three-season rooms, or entirely enclosed, no longer reaching out, welcoming.

When the radio became popular and widely available in the 1930s, families would gather around it listening to entertainment programs and news. But as the transistor radio became widely available in the late 1950s and 1960s, kids headed to their bedrooms or outside listening to their own stations.

When black and white televisions became widely available in the late 1950s, families would gather around them watching the same programming. Again, the fare was mostly family shows and news. But technology continued to improve, and TVs got cheaper. Soon, there were multiple TVs in the house and families were further divided.

With both radios and TVs, those early years saw several generations of a family gathered listening to or watching the same programs. Discussions took place about what was playing, giving kids a multi-generational perspective on the world.

But when these experiences were fragmented, kids became more isolated and their exposure to conversations about what was happening in their state, nation and world around them limited. Isolation from the family and community experience was already underway before the internet came along; long before smartphones, tablets and computers. However, these devices intensified and broadened our isolation.

“Our obsession with quantity over quality, with width versus depth, with transactional connecting versus building connections that transform us is leaving many feeling overwhelmed, over exhausted, over stretched and over it. Connecting, as we know it, has become shallow, superficial and ineffective,” author Janine Garner writes.

“Social networks are getting smaller, and levels of social participation are declining,” she writes. There are consequences for this loss.

Humans are social beings but our technological achievements, which are supposedly geared to making life easier, are making our lives lonelier. We are less connected to our family, friends and community.

In a column Glynn Davis wrote June 3, he refers to how customer service is “too often been based around a data-driven, digital-first approach that has often had the objective of stripping-out friction.”

Friction points are interactions between humans. We slow things down. Sales can’t move fast enough with humans involved. Humans cost money. They’re inefficient.

“In the physical space, this has frequently involved getting people in and out the door as fast as possible,” Davis writes. “Whether that is through self-checkouts, just-walk-out technology models or kiosks it has contributed to an epidemic in de-humanizing retail.”

Davis is a business journalist who writes for the British publication “The Retail Bulletin.”

Each step of progress leads to less interaction with another person. We lose even those few moments of time saying “hello” and “thank you” to another human being as we pick up an order or check out ourselves.

Of course, all our online orders are human-contact-free. No salesperson to talk to or cashier to have a small conversation with as are order is processed.

“The sense of community around retail has been constantly chipped away,” Davis writes. But in a broader sense, it is also eroding our sense of belonging to a community at large, he says.

A report by former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy found the average American lost 24 hours of in-person connection per month in the last two decades. 

How destructive is the loneliness culture we’ve created with our “frictionless” lives? In his report, Murthy says this “disconnection reduces lifespan as much as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Beyond just physical impacts, however, social isolation harms mental health and society at large. Connecting and engaging with others in ways that matter is also important for public life, both socially and politically.”

Davis writes about Starbucks coffee shops which pushed a frictionless experience with customers. Place your order on your phone ahead of time, pick it up and leave. “It prioritized digital orders and offered little seating, if any, in its latter stores as it prioritized off-premises business,” he writes. It has now seen the error of creating this impersonal, frictionless business model, and is trying to reverse it. 

Print bookstores, which have seen a resurgence in interest, are also implementing changes. “What bookstores have recognized is the value of connecting to local communities and personalizing the experience through physical connection,” Davis writes.

For years now, we’ve attended the Swift County Fair where we are always heartened by what we see happening among the young people involved in the 4-H programs.

The camaraderie, the enjoyment, the competition and the quiet moments with one another, doing chores together, all bring these young people closer together.

The interactions are multi-generational as family members spend time together showing animals, caring for them, and sitting together at the end of the day.

Without shared participation in public life a citizen ‘never thinks of any collective interest, of any objects to be pursued jointly with others but only in competition with them, and in some measure at their expense,” British philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote more than 150 years ago.

There is value to a physical presence with one another in our communities. We believe small-town America best offers the opportunities for physical connection – if we nurture it.

Strip a society of a sense of community, and you strip its people of a sense of the common good and a common purpose. 

We believe this sense of community, of common good through a shared story, this need for a physical presence is also why the print edition of your community newspaper is so important.