20 June

Robert Putnam tracked the shift in US culture from a focus on “I”, to a focus on “we” and then back again, over the past century. What creates a ‘we’ or a ‘public’ is existential threat, in this case WW1, Spanish Flu, the Great Depression and WW2, all in quick succession in the first half of the 20th century. Humans only come together in a we or public way when their societies are under desperate threat. Otherwise they just play status games, jostling for position in social status hierarchies. Right now we’re living in a time of uncontrolled, rampant status games, through social media culture. ‘Identity’ politics, because for social animals, status = identity. The birth of universal schooling in the first half of the 20th century also meant that the adults at the peak there in the 1960s of the ‘we’ became kidults. They learned how to act socially at school, and took that into adult life. That dramatically accelerated that downhill crash back into “I” culture. Social media *is* just high school culture, and we do everything now through social media. Everybody battling everybody else for status, for likes, emulating ‘influencers’. As kids do at school. That’s the culture.