I realized the other day, that sometimes when I have watched a show on Netflix or YouTube I have no one to talk about it with, because my friends, colleagues or family hasn’t been recommended the same content and thus haven’t seen it and when that happens it makes me feel sad.
Everything we consume virtually has become so personalized through algorithms, that it makes it difficult to share experiences with each other. The videos, posts and pictures and movies I am recommended isn’t the same as yours and neither are the advertisements. The content is often also only consumed via our personal phones, tablets or laptops.
Then I thought about how this impacted my sense of belonging and to some degree it made me feel sort of lonely. Not that I am lonely, I have a family and good friends around me, but there is something about not being able to share a moment I found funny, sad or otherwise impacted me, which another person can relate to together with me.
It makes me feel disconnected from people.
I have tried talking about something I have watched or heard which I found interesting online, but it often becomes very awkward because, the person hasn’t watched it and doesn’t know what to respond. Perhaps this is why there’s an epidemic of loneliness amongst young adults; we have nothing to connect to each other with as we all have our own personalized lived experience of content online.
Perhaps the “connection” in cyber space is in fact making us less emotionally connected to one another, making us more inclined to think “If it doesn’t concern my personal preferences or experiences it isn’t my problem”.
When my parents were young, they only had one TV channel, it was all there was and everyone watched the same news, the same shows and the same advertisements.
People could easily connect with the culture around them, because they were all experiencing, watching or listening to more or less the same things. Maybe it was easier to strike a conversation about a documentary on the radio or TV because entertainment through media was narrower and less personal than today.
I tried to find research on this topic, and I found plenty about the connections between algorithms and loneliness, algorithms and fragmentation of culture, fragmented culture and loneliness. But none that tied algorithms, fragmentation of culture and loneliness together.
Though after reading through an abstract called “From Public Square to Echo Chamber: The Fragmentation of Online Discourse” by Abhinav Pratap and Amit Pathak, which examines how social media algorithms and filter bubbles contribute to the fragmentation of online discourse, fostering ideological divides and undermining shared understanding. A paragraph in the conclusion stuck with me:
“Social media platforms, engineered to prioritize engagement through algorithmic amplification and filter bubbles, have fractured the public square into polarized echo chambers” (Pratap & Pathak, 2025)
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