by Late last year, I found myself on a train platform during a long layover, and the only thing the people around me had in common was a muttered complaint about the Wi-Fi. We were in the same physical space, each of us looking into a private screen. Nobody was listening to the same song. Nobody was watching the same video. The one thing shared was that nothing was shared.
It wasn’t always this way. Thirty years ago, if you walked through any public space in the middle of the week, you could bet that most people had seen the same episode of the same show the night before. Water cooler conversations worked because everyone drank from the same well. The Simpsons. The Super Bowl halftime show. The movie everyone was quoting. There was a texture to the cultural fabric that felt universal — one we didn’t appreciate until it was gone.
What replaced it isn’t nothing. It’s a million niches, all running in parallel. Your algorithm knows you better than any broadcaster ever could. The trade-off is that you and your neighbor now live in entirely different recommendation ecosystems. You both saw something amazing last night. Chances are it wasn’t the same thing, and you’ll never talk about it.
That part bothers me more than I expected. Not because I think mass culture was better — a lot of it was lowest-common-denominator filler. But there was something quietly valuable about the forced common ground. The shared vocabulary that came from all watching the same trainwreck or cheering the same finale. It greased the wheels of everyday conversation with strangers. It made small talk smaller, in a good way.
Now most of our cultural touchpoints are opt-in. You find your people. You lose everyone else. Connection became deeper in the places it matters and thinner everywhere else. I’m not sure that’s a net loss, exactly. But standing on that platform, watching twenty people scroll past each other in perfect silence, it felt like a real one.
The Wi-Fi was slow that day. For five minutes, everyone looked up at the same time, exchanged a knowing half-smile, and went back to their phones. Maybe that’s the last version of a shared cultural moment — not a show, not a song, just the collective acknowledgment that the internet is, once again, letting us down.
That has to count for something.
— Teganna