This story highlights an interesting gap in who knows their neighbors. Yet, this statistic is brought up so you can make sure you are not paying their utility bills. First, the statistic:
However, chatting to your neighbors is not as common as it used to be. A Pew Center study shows that fewer young Americans are familiar with their neighbors. Among adults under age 30, about a quarter (23%) claim to not know any of their neighbors, compared with 4% of those aged 65 and up.
Why might it be useful to know your neighbors?
That’s what happened to Brooke Patterson. She took to TikTok to explain how she realized that she had apparently been paying for her entire apartment building’s utility bills — for two years.
The gap cited above could be the result of multiple factors. People 65 and up might have lived in places longer. They had different social norms regarding neighborly interaction. They might not rely on technology as much in order to interact with people.
Is the primary goal to knowing your neighbors to save money? Or others might suggest your neighbors could help you look out for your property. Other primary goals for knowing your neighbors could include acting neighborly – looking out for each other, offering aid when helpful – and building community. That could come with cost savings down the road or even positive money if the character of the neighborhood helps boost property values. This might be another difference over time: what people hope to gain through social interaction.
Our bathrooms, bedrooms, kitchens, and dining rooms are places of great physical intimacy, and we often measure our closeness with others by the rooms we are willing to share with them. Close proximity also means vulnerability, and trust is an essential component of inhabiting common spaces and microbial environments. But our preferences are malleable. Both individualism and cooperation are learned traits; like muscles, the more we use them the stronger they become. Some of us just uncritically accept the private apartment or single-family home for ourselves because it is what our societies consider “normal.”
As noted above, imagining different housing possibilities is difficult because Americans are used to these options and what tends to be idealized. These options have been promoted for decades and backed with government funds and policies, ideologies, and preferences. To promote other options – like cohousing – requires a concerted and prolonged effort. Even calling such options “utopian” suggests it is unusual and perhaps unattainable.
This reminds me of the 2010 book In the Neighborhoodwhere Peter Lovenheim tries to get to know his neighbors, with the mark of success being able to stay overnight. It is one thing to say hi to a neighbor, it is another to regularly welcome them into your home.
Smith Mount, chair of the city council in Huntington, West Virginia, was determined to see her community launch the state’s initial outdoor drinking zone — an idea made possible only after the legislature changed the state’s alcohol law earlier this year…
Huntington leaders saw the district as a way to encourage economic growth by drawing more people to the heart of the city: The hope is that by allowing people to grab a drink and linger, they’ll spend more time and money downtown. Steps away from the banks of the Ohio River, the zone’s few square blocks include local restaurants, bars and shops…
In recent years, several states have relaxed alcohol consumption laws to allow communities to create their own limited drinking zones. They aim to revitalize downtown cores hollowed out by the changing nature of retail and the post-pandemic loss of office workers…
Aside from bringing foot traffic to shops and restaurants, officials say the success of the new districts reveals the need to update antiquated liquor laws that long banned public consumption in most places to try to reduce public intoxication and drunken driving. While some critics have raised concerns about the new districts’ potential to promote drinking, crime or littering, organizers across the country say they have largely been adopted without incident.
This has happened in a number of places in the last decade or so. The importance of business shows up here as alcohol is assumed to be a means by which people will buy and consume more. Alcohol by itself can help boost business as it can be profitable to sell and can then generate more local revenue through taxes. Alcohol plus walking and visiting other nearby locations offers additional benefits.
A side effect of this might be a larger social scene. If people are willing to be downtown and linger, there are more opportunities to interact with each other. While alcohol could lead to negative interactions, it could also lead to people willing to enjoy more time around others. The United States does not have a strong legacy of third places or public squares; could alcohol help turn downtowns into regular social scenes?
That’s why a group of researchers from Chile, Italy, Israel, Russia, Slovenia, and Spain recently collaborated to understand the mathematics behind “six degrees of separation.” They discovered that a natural human social challenge– weighing the costs versus benefits of social ties– may point toward the root of “the magic number six.”
Take a moment to think about why social networking is so coveted– in both work and recreation. Oftentimes, individuals hope to gain something, whether that be status or prominence, by identifying strategic social connections.
In these cases, people aren’t just hoping to accumulate a massive number of connections. Instead, they’re looking to find more meaningful “right” connections– which will essentially place them in a middle-network position and allow them to funnel more information flowing through their network…
At the heart of this game is the goal of social centrality, and once this battle reaches a sort-of equilibrium, all people involved have secured a position in the network that balances their drive for status against their budget for friendships.
“When we did the math, we discovered an amazing result: this process always ends with social paths centered around the number six. This is quite surprising,” explained Professor Baruch Barzel, one of the study’s lead authors.
I wonder what people might think if they saw this explanation of social relationships: it is a tradeoff between a central position in a network and how much they can spend on relationships. In some ways, we hear this in discussions of social networking where the goal is to create a lot of connections and a good flow of information and resources to you. On the other hand, viewing relationships as commodities or as transactional seems disrespectful and cruel.
Do we know that number six has always been the value or has this changed over time given social changes, settlement patterns, and other factors that differentiate life in different periods and contexts?
Developers began mass producing tracts of parklike suburban housing in the 1920s, and the trend burgeoned after WWII. All along, sociologists have found that parents move to the suburbs in large part for their children’s success. Those goals shaped the housing structure in these new developments, which featured single-family homes and activities centered on nuclear families of parents and children.
“Suburbia is so individualized, privatized, and family-oriented,” said Miller. “Relationships beyond those boundaries are seen as bonuses or good things to have, but not necessary.”
The arrangement of the American suburbs also narrows a person’s potential pool of friends. “When you’re making decisions based on schools, quality of life, and affordability, you end up preselecting your social relationships and possible friends,” Miller said.
In this milieu, Miller said, many Americans end up making friends based on two things: geographic proximity or shared interests. For example, one might find friends at grocery stores, local parks, or children’s activities like schools and sports. But even proximity and shared interests are not enough to push people into deeper friendships, as Langan has found.
Later in the article:
Miller sees this tension in his research on the suburbs, where—again—people prioritize family success over friendships. Over the past two decades, most books published on practicing faith in the suburbs have pushed against the societal current of surface-level and transactional relationships. “You should be forming relationships with people who have nothing to give you, nothing to offer you,” Miller said, summarizing a key theme in Dave Goetz’s 2006 book Death by Suburb: How to Keep the Suburbs from Killing Your Soul (HarperCollins, 2007). “That’s where you may truly meet God and meet people.”
Miller has seen some Wheaton students take these teachings to heart as they graduate. Some friend groups will decide to live together for one or two years post-graduation, focusing on relationships rather than careers. “That’s frowned on as delaying adulthood, but it poses a great question for Christians about what we value,” Miller said. “Is it about going out after graduation and finding the ‘best job’ and then finding people later? Or is it prioritizing relationships, friendships, and connections to a local church? I hope we would say that the latter are more meaningful in the long run.”
Build and idealize a suburban landscape around single-family homes, nuclear family life, exclusion, and driving and these are some of the patterns of social interaction that develop. I am sure there are numerous ways to address this; there are many researchers better suited to comment on that. Yet, it is helpful to know the underlying factors that contribute to difficulties to forming adult friendships at the start of the 21st century in the United States (in addition to oft-cited factors like social media).
Sometimes you had to step away. So you threw up an Away Message: I’m not here. I’m in class/at the game/my dad needs to use the comp. I’ve left you with an emo quote that demonstrates how deep I am. Or, here’s a song lyric that signals I am so over you. Never mind that my Away Message is aimed at you.
I miss Away Messages. This nostalgia is layered in abstraction; I probably miss the newness of the internet of the 1990s, and I also miss just being … away. But this is about Away Messages themselves—the bits of code that constructed Maginot Lines around our availability. An Away Message was a text box full of possibilities, a mini-MySpace profile or a Facebook status update years before either existed. It was also a boundary: An Away Message not only popped up as a response after someone IM’d you, it was wholly visible to that person before they IM’d you.
Messaging today, whether through texting or apps, does not work the same way:
Catapulting even further back into the past for a moment: Old-fashioned phone calls used to, and sometimes still do, start with “Hey, you free?” Santamaria points out. “You were going to tell me if you could talk before we started the conversation.” There’s a version of this today—someone might preface their message with “Not urgent, respond when you can,” for example—but for the most part, we just send the text message without consideration, Santamaria says. Interruption is the default.
The ability to walk away from communication and the demands it makes on a person struck me as similar to one of the three “basic forms of social liberty” humans had before settling in cities and large societies. Anthropologists David Graeber and David Wengrow say the second form was “the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others.” Text messages, emails, and messages in apps create a pressure for someone to respond. To not have these digital “commands,” one practically not use apps and devices.
Is this the freedom we have traded to use social media, the Internet, and smartphones? People can unplug but it is difficult to do that and still participate in regular social life today. Saying no to messages or refusing to respond will likely not garner many friends or close connections. And related to the first form of freedom, “the freedom to move away or relocate from one’s surroundings,” the messages and apps can follow us anywhere there is Internet access or cell coverage.
These platforms succeed by encouraging messaging and connections. But, what if a basic human freedom is the one to say no to that interaction when desired?
These norms reveal how moderation is complicated by trying to map the social conventions of the physical world onto virtual reality. If you covered yourself in purple body paint and showed up at an in-person medical conference, you’d probably be asked to leave. At a metaverse medical conference, the other attendees wouldn’t even bat an eye. This relaxing of certain social norms leads people to test the bounds of acceptable behavior, and moderators in some cases have to decide what crosses the line. For instance, new users will often pat strangers on the head, an interaction that would be strange and a little invasive in real life. Educators in VR tries to discourage people from doing this, though it seems to fall into a gray area of rude but not totally offensive. The same goes for pacing excessively around a room, walking through other users, or fidgeting too much with your controllers, which can cause your VR hands to distractingly bounce around. “People don’t get it at first because a lot of people come into VR from a gaming platform, so they don’t fully grasp the fact that behind every avatar is a person,” said Myer. During one of the events I moderated, VanFossen asked me to message an attendee to step back because he was a little too close to the speaker and invading her personal space. I needed the nudge: It’s hard to tell how close is too close in the metaverse. It’s not like you can feel the other person breathe.
To account for these gray areas, Educators in VR calibrates the strictness of the moderation based on the type of event. Parties are a bit more laissez-faire, while group meditation sessions have a zero tolerance policy where you might be removed simply for moving around the room too much. “I was very much against zero tolerance until I started witnessing what that meant,” said VanFossen of meditation events. “People are there for a reason, whether this is their daily thing, they have a crap stressful job, they need a break, or they have mental health issues.” Moderation levels also differ by platform—AltspaceVR tends to be stricter because it’s targeted at professionals, while VRChat is known for anarchy.
It remains to be seen how moderation will work at scale as the metaverse accelerates its expansion. At the moment, developers don’t seem to have a good answer. AltSpaceVR has been trying to put moderation tools into the hands of its users and also has staff on hand to help with particularly volatile situations. Meta has similarly relied on users themselves to block and report troublemakers in Horizon Worlds. Yet if tech companies succeed in their grand ambitions to get billions of people to inhabit the metaverse, maintaining it is going to take an immense amount of time and energy from a countless number of people who have to make tough, nuanced decisions minute by minute. As VanFossen said, “It’s the most disgusting, frustrating, stress-inducing, headache-inducing, mental health–depleting job on the planet.”
Social interactions and spaces require social norms. People appreciate knowing how to act and how they will be treated. Without them, chaos or anarchy or worse ensues
Enforcing social norms is an important matter. In many situations, the norms are communicated and enforced in less explicit or informal ways. People see what is happening and respond similarly or they have a general idea of how to behave. In other situations, the norms need to be explicitly addressed, perhaps through formal guidelines or enforcers who step in when needed.
What sounds unique about the situation discussed above is (1) the social space is relatively new, (2) unfamiliar to a lot of people, and (3) is still in flux because of #1 and #2 plus ongoing changes. The moderators are trying to step in and they are creating the norms as they go. If the metaverse becomes more popular, the norms will solidify as the space and the proper behavior becomes more known.
In Musk’s mind, “Twitter serves as the de facto public town square,” and as such, it should be a place where people are able to speak their minds. This metaphor seems slightly off, though. Yes, for people like Musk it’s a place to have debates they think are important for humanity; people with millions of followers are often the people who think what they’re saying is most important. But for the rest of Twitter—some 229 million daily users—it’s more like a metropolis. People have neighborhoods they stick to; sometimes they go out and talk with friends, sometimes they watch from their windows, sometimes they talk up strangers in a park. Most of these aren’t the kind of world-changing conversations Musk seems to want to have, but they’re just as vital.
As someone who studies cities and suburbs as well as social media, a few thoughts:
The idea of a “town square” seems quaint in a mass society. At the scale of a society like the United States, is there really a single place where everyone can come together? This may have better fit an earlier era of mass media – such as the opening decades of television – or for particular events – the mass viewership of the Super Bowl – but generally does not apply when a country has over 300 million residents.
A “town square” would seem to fit better in a smaller community or neighborhood. The capacity of a town square would be limited. What would the equivalent be in a big city: a plaza? A main thoroughfare or major park where people gather for rallies or protests?
On social media, many users friend or interact with people they know offline. Twitter is a little different model since you follow people but a sustained follow can lead to understanding the other user more. The platforms are not generally set up to interact with random users nor do many users choose to do that.
The goal of participating in durable social media communities is also what Facebook is pushing these days. Even as the early years of the Internet offered potential to connect with anyone in the world, many users found people with like interests and spent a lot of time there. If this is indeed more like city neighborhoods, what then connects the central plaza or town square to all the neighborhoods? How much flow or interaction is there back and forth?
The fact that Secret Service, NCIS, and even DHS personnel were apparently fooled about the authenticity of Taherzadeh and Ali doesn’t actually surprise experts in the field. There’s a human tendency to accept people are who they say they are.
A cynic might say that this makes people an easy mark. Some people will take advantage of the willingness of others to trust them. This is part of the reason spam and scams work: people might not be the most discerning, particularly when the pitch looks viable.
Yet, this giving people the benefit of the doubt increases sociability, cooperation, and trust in the long run. Not everyone will take advantage of you. Humans like to be liked and work with others. Humans are social creatures whose social relationships and networks enable them to do things far beyond what the might accomplish as individuals (read more about this in Connected).
Directly confronting someone about suspicions we may have of them also is a risk. It introduces conflict and an opportunity for both the questioner and the other to be uncomfortable. As we practice impression management, we generally want to avoid losing face. Ignoring a text or email is relatively easy to do; the stakes are higher when the other person is in front of you.
This does not necessarily mean that security agencies should not have structures and/or actors who try to counter these human tendencies. But, the task may be very difficult in light of how humans want to behave.
Billionaire Zuckerberg is betting his company’s future on the metaverse but is keen to make it a collaborative project, describing it as an “embodied internet”…
“We believe the metaverse may be the next generation of the internet — combining the physical and digital world in a persistent and immersive manner — and not purely a virtual reality world,” the report says.”
A device-agnostic metaverse accessible via PCs, game consoles, and smartphones could result in a very large ecosystem.”
The metaverse has the potential to further link realms. The embodied aspect is interesting to consider; how much will the offline body move in sync with the online body? How much further will we move beyond guiding an avatar around an online platform with a mouse or keyboard? And what potential is there to truly meld online and offline experiences at the same time?
I wonder how much this embodiment can happen in the metaverse as compared to other technological options. For example, Google Glass and similar options offered the opportunity to overlay data on top of what a person was seeing and experiencing. Or, Pokemon Go put video game characters in an offline map and reality.
Legally Sociable 