April 6, 2026

Over the last year, I have gotten really into F1. I watch races every Sunday, follow coverage between races, and increasingly spend time in online communities debating strategy and breaking down races.

None of my close friends follow F1. They do not know the teams, drivers, or storylines, so I cannot really talk about it with them. Instead, the deeper I get into the sport, the more I interact with strangers online who share my interests but whom I have never met and probably never will.

Contrast that with the Toronto Raptors. Growing up in Canada, my friends and I all followed the team. We watched the same seasons, reacted to the same games, and celebrated the 2019 championship together. Even now, when I go back to Toronto, the Raptors provide an instant point of connection with friends or strangers at a bar.

My friends and I still have plenty in common. But what if that overlap kept shrinking? We could be physically close while increasingly living in different cultural worlds. The people online might begin to feel closer simply because we share the same inputs.

This dynamic erodes social capital: the trust, shared norms, and relationships that allow communities to function. Social capital accumulates through repeated interaction, shared experience, and participation in communal life. When it weakens, trust declines, participation falls, and communities fragment.

Social media has accelerated this erosion by disrupting the shared patterns of consumption that once helped sustain community.

Historically, mass media aligned attention. People read the same books, watched the same television shows and movies, and followed the same major sporting events. These shared inputs created common reference points that made social interaction easier.

The early internet largely preserved this model. Most people consumed rather than produced content, so the internet functioned primarily as a new distribution layer for mass media. Early social networks such as Facebook also remained organized around existing relationships, extending offline communities online.

That changed as platforms optimized for engagement. TikTok and similar platforms organize content around predicted individual interest rather than social connection. Users no longer consume primarily from people they know, but from a global pool of content personalized to them.

The result is a world of increasingly distinct media environments. Two people sitting next to each other can spend hours online and emerge with almost no shared context. I get F1; my friends get something entirely different.

That matters because social capital depends partly on shared experiences. The fewer common reference points we have, the harder connection becomes. I am far more likely to meet someone at a Toronto bar who watched the last Raptors game than someone who saw the same TikTok as me.

AI will intensify this dynamic. Personalization will become more precise, and individual digital experiences will diverge further.

But there are signs that this fragmentation is creating its own counterforce. People appear increasingly hungry for cultural overlap.

Sports are the clearest example. A live game cannot be personalized. Millions of people watch the same uncertain sequence of events at the same time, creating a shared emotional and temporal experience. The value lies partly in knowing that everyone else saw it too.

Super Bowl viewership has climbed back to record levels after declining through the late 2010s and bottoming around 2021. Many people at Super Bowl parties are not even football fans. They want to participate in a shared cultural event. New York during the Knicks’ playoff run showed the same thing: plenty of people who had barely watched basketball suddenly became obsessed, not just with the games, but with having a recurring excuse to gather with friends around a shared cultural event.

Films and music can play the same role. When something breaks through a fragmented media environment, it gives people a common language. The appeal is not only the content itself, but being part of the conversation around it.

Physical gatherings amplify this effect. People do not join run clubs only to run or attend trivia nights only to answer questions. They are drawn to experiences that combine shared content with shared space. In a hyper-personalized world, genuinely collective experiences have become scarce and therefore more valuable.

What can look like nostalgia may actually be adaptation. Sports, movies, concerts, clubs, and other communal experiences are not simply remnants of a less digital era. They are mechanisms through which people rebuild the cultural overlap that personalized media has stripped away.

As the world becomes more personalized, shared experience becomes more valuable. And as AI makes shared experiences scarcer, people will increasingly seek them out.