Is the Public Square Fragmenting?

It's well-documented that, as a country, we're sorting ourselves geographically more than ever. Since Bill Bishop's The Big Sort hit bookshelves in 2008, this phenomenon has been established in the public mind, and according to the author and other political scientists the trend has only accelerated in recent times.

It's one of the forces that have contributed to the decline of our shared spaces—the ones we occupy with those who see politics differently—along with a decline in participation in civic organizations, as charted in the work of political scientist Robert Putnam. His 2000 book Bowling Alone used the decline in bowling league membership (while bowling itself was booming) as an emblematic example of our disengagement from civic life.

Putnam also described a shift in membership trends toward activist groups, but the interactions there tended to be less in-person and more passive: "the only act of membership consists in writing a check for dues or perhaps occasionally reading a newsletter." Since its publication, several of the contributing forces the book described have intensified, especially the influence of technology in moving our engagement away from face-to-face interactions—though at least we now have our Zoom meetings.

The arenas where Americans interact and exchange ideas with people who have different life experiences—whether those ideas are recipes and workout tips, or our deeply held core beliefs—have shifted dramatically from around tables to behind screens.

There's a common narrative around our media consumption—and especially social media—which holds that we're increasingly trapped in "echo chambers" that only let us see the people and ideas that align with what we already believe.

The reality is that we still do have a shared digital public square, and it's more (little-d) democratized than ever, with anyone who wants to contribute to the conversation able to do so. Research from 2011 found that we do mix politically online more so than in our other social networks, like our family, friends and coworkers, and that doesn't seem to be changing.

Even today, with social media platforms themselves becoming more overtly partisan, it appears as though users don't want to interact only with their own kind. After a big launch in July, Meta's X (formerly Twitter) competitor Threads has seen a precipitous drop-off in traffic, even as Elon Musk has drawn continual criticism from the left for moves that seem to make X a more hospitable place for conservatives. And explicitly right-wing social networks like Parler and Truth Social have struggled to gain traction.

Source: Similarweb blog

Even so, the degree to which those online interactions contribute to polarization continues to grow. A study published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examined the causality behind this polarizing effect, and it painted an interesting picture of the mechanism at work.

The author, Petter Törnberg, cited previous research debunking both the "echo chamber" idea and a supposed "backfire effect," noting that we don't actually seem to get more extreme the more we talk to the other side.

But here's what is happening: because the conversation is global, rather than local, our interactions are increasingly sorting us into a tidy binary. Progressives aren't leaving X in droves—Threads has roughly the same proportion of its users as X who identify as liberal, though it does have slightly fewer conservatives—because it's still where much of the conversation is happening. And it still offers a place for partisans to signal their loyalty.

"Digital media do not isolate us from opposing ideas," says Törnberg, "Au contraire, they bring us to interact with individuals outside our local bubble, and they throw us into a political war, in which we are forced to take sides." Let's dig into this phenomenon a bit more, since the picture is somewhat complex.

In fact, complexity itself is what can actually mitigate polarization: in our communities we generally have cross-cutting interests, where we're aligned with some people on certain issues and others on different ones. These interests can vary based on our identities as parents or single people, our work in different sectors, our political preferences, or even our sports team loyalties. We can still have plenty of conflict, but it tends to be limited by our other, more-aligned interests.

The metaphor of a "social fabric" helps us understand how cross-cutting identities and values can strengthen our communities and country. Just as fabric is strengthened by the nature of overlap between strands, societies are strengthened by the way different identities overlap with one another.

Once those identities become aligned along a binary, so that what you believe about an issue can predict other things about you, whether it's your beliefs on other issues or your social, economic or geographic characteristics, it's much more likely that you'll be alienated from someone else who doesn't share any of those traits.

And that's precisely what happens online. Our red-blue tribal identities vastly overwhelm any other factors, like our local cultures, doing away with our cross-connections, and leading our social fabric to tear.

With the distance that the digital world creates between us and the complex interconnections of our offline lives, we need to recognize the increasing importance of the shared spaces in our communities, especially those that foster more enduring relationships, like physical spaces.

It's another reason that organizations, which can give us the chance to encounter those with whom we might not otherwise cross paths, are so important in keeping our country's social fabric strong. We may not share the same viewpoint with the other parents in the PTA, or the other small business owners in the local chamber of commerce, but being in regular contact gives us a chance to get to know them as people, which breeds trust, polarization's kryptonite.

But organizations must be mindful about preserving the nature of those spaces, especially in the face of pressures like convenience and remote meetings, which push us towards less personal modes of communication.

It's not just how we communicate that matters, but where we do it. And right now we need to be extra vigilant, for the sake of our country's future.