Local Connection

Social media has become regular media. Instead of helping us build and cultivate healthy social relationships, social media has explored the limits of human attention spans online in pursuit of ad revenue to maximize shareholder value.

I want to connect with the people around me through real world experiences. I want more focus on the good around me and more nudges toward being a part of it.

A few of the areas to play:

• Ideation / Discovery
  • What cool things are out there to do together - food / drink / recreation?
  • Not the exhaustive list (e.g. Google Places). Just the stuff that excites.
• Collaborative planning
  • How do we converge the availability and interests of all of the people involved?
  • Easy inclusion of new people into groups
• Engagement assists
  • Remove points of friction in the group experience
• Feedback
  • Social incentives to share and record our best experiences

I plan to keep building in this space to create the value I want to see in the world.

Plenty of things in this list have been tackled and not succeeded. Are there 10x UX versions of these things that could exist now, utilizing new AI capabilities?

How different does this problem look in rural vs urban environments? Humans evolved to function successfully in very small communities. Modern society operates with very different parameters. Small town life offers some solutions to local connection, but historical small town dynamics no longer exist without the technological overlay of social media and immediate connection.

Some interesting ideas that have come up in recent conversations:

• Cell phones as the beginning of our social disconnect
  • Reduced local anchor to friendships. Location and time constraints could be skipped over.
    • The value of planning and consistency was massively reduced.
    • Routine / connection to place and time / sense of belonging reduced.
• Social media made it even easier to maintain contact with an infinitely growing pool of friends
  • Much of the contact is light touch or voyeuristic
    • We believe we are seeing without being seen.
    • Becomes parasocial at the extreme
  • Net effect is not maintaining a healthy, vulnerable sense of being known and belonging
• Earned vs. unearned friendships
  • We have unearned friendships (neighbors, grade school friends, etc) and friendships that are earned by our efforts over time (college classmates, coworkers, club members, etc).
  • With “local” broken by instant communication, it’s easier to focus on the massive volume of earned friendships we could have, rather than the unearned friendships that more accurately map to our evolved psychology.