What Cities Can Teach Us About Life Online

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I'm Hannah Rosen. This is Radio Atlantic, and today we're going to do something special.
I'm going to introduce you to our latest season of the Atlantic How-To Podcast. This season is called How to Know What's Real.
And with me today in the studio is one of the hosts of the new season, Atlantic staff writer Megan Garber. Hi, Megan.
Hi. Good to be here.

So, Megan, I'm going to tell you a story. Okay.
Yes, please. The other day, I was sitting in a giant urban food hall, and I was sitting there with my partner.
It was like Saturday or Sunday. It was very crowded.
and she telling me an incredibly like heated story about somebody who she got into a fight with and it's like she's getting kind of like more and more heated up and it's like f-bomb f-bomb f-bomb she's like she has a loud voice anyway and somebody a total stranger sits down at the table next to us with her children who are teenagers not kids okay and she looks over and she says could you stop cursing oh exactly and i spent like i spent a week thinking about this like what are the rules in that situation? This is a giant urban environment. Like, you are supposed to come into contact with strangers.
The rules of how to behave are totally unclear. My partner can tell whatever story she wants in whatever way she wants.
And like, here's the mom coming in and making this request. And it was just very complicated, I suddenly realized, to navigate this crashing of strangers into each other.
Oh, yes. And can I ask, what did you do in that moment? Did you respond to the woman? Or did your partner? Oh, my God.
I mean, if you met my partner, you would know the answer to this question. She was like, hell no.
And you can move over there if you want to. And I was like, just hiding under the table.
I'm going to go get some water. Exactly.
That's how that story ended. Anyway, Megan, the reason I'm telling you this story is because it turns out that navigating cities and all of these complicated dynamics that happen in cities is a lot closer to navigating an online space than a lot of people realize.
Yes, exactly. And I think that's also in part because, you know, the web is in some ways so new, so unprecedented, right? But in other ways, the challenges it presents, despite all the new technology, are challenges that people have faced before, right? There are sociological challenges, really, in kind of fundamental ways, questions about how people see each other or fail to see each other or make space for each other or can't make space for each other.
And so I love this idea of history as almost giving a little bit of context and perhaps a little bit of hope, too, in terms of how we can navigate these really big new questions that are in some ways very old questions, too. How does this specific episode fit with the wider goal of the season? So much of this season really is about making these connections between things that might seem separate at first.
So, you know, fantasy and reality, the web and the physical worlds, cities and the web. We really, my co-host Andrea Valdez and I wanted to really put the web and all the questions it brings up into a new kind of context and perspective.
And, you know, spoiler, we are not going to fully answer how to know what's real, but we're hoping that we can help to clarify where the reality is among the things that might not seem fully real. So listeners, here's episode two of the latest season of How To, How to Live in a Digital City.
I've lived in a few different cities and each one seems to have its own rules, you know, its own way of functioning. I grew up in a city dominated by cars, which is pretty different from a walkable city.
Oftentimes what you find is when you're in a walking city, you do have a different experience of what it means to actually walk among people. And you're not just in your car, isolated, listening to the radio or whatever.
And you're actually kind of face to face with people. But you're also trying to be polite and not stare and not make too much eye contact.
But, you know, if someone does make passing eye contact with you, you have a little smile. There's all those little things that you're trying to figure out and navigate, which is different than city car culture.
Oh, it's so interesting thinking about the differences too between a walkable city, like you said, or a car city and the way those different infrastructures really do affect the cultural codes between people and the ways that we interact with each other. I'm Andrea Valdez.
I'm an editor at The Atlantic. And I'm Megan Garber, a writer at The Atlantic.
This is how to know what's real. Megan, do you ever feel like you're just actually living online? Oh, say more about that.
I work from home. So a lot of my work relationships, they happen online through Zoom, through Slack, through Gchat, email.
And then when I log off, I go to veg out or watch television. And I often have my phone in my face.
I don't know if I'm sure I'm not alone in that. You're not.
And I do have hobbies. I have a social life, I promise.
But even though I, of course, hang out with my friends in real life, a lot of our interactions are via text. So I have all these group texts.
Each of my group chats has kind of its own little personality. It just feels like there's screens, screens, screens.
And it's interesting, too, because of those apps you're talking about, I have my own versions of them. And I think most of us do.
And I've been thinking a lot about how even though the web feels expansive, we can basically also design our own unique little spaces within it. That's true.
Yeah. And that environment, even though it's not strictly a place, can feel to me like this almost ever-growing city where you have all these people trying to navigate the same space at the same time.
And there are so many things in the city that are great, that are also great about the Internet. You have, you know, all that sort of ferment, all this culture, like exposure to people who are different from you, who you probably otherwise wouldn't be exposed to and wouldn't be able to interact with.
So it's so wonderful in that way, but I think there are so many new challenges to navigate to. I mean, one of the fascinating things about cities, of course, is scale, right? Not just the scale of buildings, although that's often part of it, but the number of people.
When it comes to a city, you never expect to know everybody, and that's okay.

And there's something beautiful about walking down a busy street and not to necessarily get to know everybody intimately, right?

But just to smile at the different fashion or the different ways of moving about the world.

This way of acknowledging that humanity is bigger than your own little part of it. So, Andrea, to think more about that idea of the Internet as a place, I talked with Dana Boyd, who's a partner researcher at Microsoft Research and also a distinguished visiting professor at Georgetown University.

She studies the intersection of technology and society and thinks really deeply about how people build communities and digital spaces. And we talked about what the history of cities can tell us about the way we live online.
When we go online, you know, there's joy in interacting with the people we know. But there's also pleasure to, you know, what I think of as that digital street, right? The ability to just see other people living their lives in ways that you're just like, wow, that's different and I'm intrigued.
And I used to love this living in New York. Every morning I would go in to the guy at the deli, and I never knew his name, he never knew my name, but we would nod and we would smile.
I wouldn't even have to order because he knew what I was going to order. And then we would make small talk about something random, and there was something comfortable about that where we didn't have to become best friends, but it was still a recognition of humanity.
And those moments where, you know, we move relationships in different phases in our lives in different ways, but we still have this recognition of humanity of strangers, I think is a really important part. And that's something that's core to the city.
I'm so interested in how people adjust their behavior, not just in relation to their physical settings, but also in response to the types of people they're interacting with. But also those rules can be so hard to discern, right, because they're often really unspoken and tacit.
thinking again about the city, after the shift towards mass urbanization, a bunch of social scientists got interested in that question too and turned those unspoken rules into a really fascinating field of study. I'm thinking about one in particular.
So could you talk a little bit about Irving Goffman? Irving Goffman was a sociologist. He was really interested in micro dynamics within the social world.
And one of my favorites of his was this recognition of civil inattention. And that's this idea that, you know, you're sitting in a cafe, it's very crowded, or a restaurant, and you can hear the conversation next to you.
And you listen in and you sort of pay attention, but you're performing as though you're not paying attention. But at the same time, they know they're in a public space.
They know that somebody is likely to be able to overhear them. And there's, you know, these ways in which you broker that.
Sometimes people perform to be overheard. And the civil and attention concept was really important because it was a recognition that you had this sense of publicness, But you also had this, you know, recognition of what was an appropriate norm and behavior.
Yeah, we know in a city it's so obvious that we can't build authentic deep relationships with everyone whose paths we cross. But I think online, that idea and that obviousness doesn't always translate.

But I think there's something very clarifying about that idea of civil inattention that Goffman talked about. And I wonder, are there other thinkers that we could look to to learn more about the city? Stanley Milgram was really interested in a notion of the familiar stranger.
He's best known for some of his post-World War II experiments of, you know, would you torment and torture somebody? And, of course, these are very controversial experiments. But he really just wanted to understand different aspects of what, you know, made social life social life.
Yeah. And, you know, he's doing it in the mid-20th century, so he's also, not only is he responding to World War II, but he's responding to mass urbanization.
And so he's looking at, like, what is this thing called the city, you know, from different perspectives of the people interacting it. But he also did this really great study where he had his students go to certain public transit stops.
And you'd start to realize that, you know, same people got the 702 train every day or whatever. And so there was a level of recognition and familiarity with them.
What happens when you take people out of that context and reach a point where you're like, oh, I know you. And the further away that context is, the more you're like, I really know you, right? If you run into that person, you know, say in Europe, when you normally would just see them sort of on the streets in New York City, you'd be like, we're going to be best friends, right? Because we have so much in common compared to our current context.
Oh, that's so interesting. And it's fascinating, too, that Milgram is such a touchpoint because, just like you said, I think most of us do associate him with his experiments with cruelty.
And it's interesting to think about the double edges of familiarity and strangeness that he was exploring and how that can beget community or, on the other hand, be taken

to another extreme. Andrea, I think part of the reason I'm so interested in drawing parallels

between the social patterns of cities and the internet is that we have this really rich history

of mass urbanization that we can point to. And one that was not that long ago, right? Yeah.
You know, in the last four or five decades, there's just been a huge move to cities. More than half of our global population lives in cities.
That's around 4 billion people. Wow.
Yeah. So a lot of them are just adjusting to the changes that Goffman and Milgram studied.
Right, yeah. And while that's a huge switch, it's even more drastic when we look at how many people have access to the web.
So there's 5.4 billion people who now have access to the digital world. Wow.
5.4 billion people living online together, and there's practically no distance separating us. So right now, it's like the sparkle and spectacle of the shininess of the internet.
It's started to fade, and we're really aware in this moment of, you know, trash in the comments and crowds on the timeline and, you know, misinformation graffiti on the walls.

Misinformation graffiti is going to haunt me. But also cities over time did learn how to deal with those problems and to make themselves into more livable spaces.
But the web is so relatively new that we just don't have many of those systems in place yet. Dr.
Boyd, when I think about the comparisons between city life and this era of our lives online, I actually find myself thinking back to early cities, the cities before traffic lights and indoor plumbing, before all the infrastructure that was later created to keep people safe and healthy and to keep them from harming one another, actually, whether intentionally or not. So I wonder, what are some of the strategies you've seen people make use of? How are people finding the calm or quiet away from the city feeling in digital spaces? I mean, let's be clear.
A lot of people have checked out, right? Yeah. You know, they're just, and it's not unlike, it's like, I've had enough of the city.
And they've gone really private, right? You know, it's important to recognize that there's ebbs and flows to this. People are like, I want more public.
I want less public, right? And that happens in terms of life stage, right? Where people actually have periods of their lives where, you know, the 20s are sort of a classic one where a disproportionate number of people in their 20s are like, let me be in public.

And then, you know, you get these other moments where, you know, classic one is, you know, after the birth of children, people really go into more intimate circles for a period of time.

And so you see these ebbs and flows that are life stage, they're temporal, they have to do with, you know, different economic dynamics, and we can think of, again, the parallel to the city. There are times where the city is like the place that everybody wants to be, and there are times where the city is narrated as dark and deviant and a terrible place to be.
Retreating is a protective measure, and that's fine at certain times. It's emotionally protective.
It keeps us safe. And sometimes we're in a crisis.
And to be clear, like in the United States right now, we have a mental health crisis that's not just young people. Those are very healthy times to retreat.
I think Americans tend to assume that if you are a public person in some way, if you have some level of publicity, that in some ways you get what you deserve, right? Angelina Jolie, you know, she has to know that she is being watched or could potentially be watched all the time. And I wonder if that idea is now becoming just more banal and more common.
And one of the things that fascinates me about the city is that in some sense, we are all surveilled whenever we are moving throughout the city. And there's, you know, we have these environments where everyone has their cameras on them.
I could be filmed at any moment. I wonder what you think about just how we see other people in that environment where anyone really could be on the receiving end of fame, of publicity.
Right. And I think this is where we see the shift from being watched to being surveilled.
I think you picked up the right term here, which is that when we go out in the city, we also allow ourselves to be watched. You know, I'm going out to see and be seen, right? Those are part of the same.
And, you know, in that moment, we expect to be seen, but, you know, we also expect it to go away. We expect a certain ephemerality.
And in many ways, a lot of the public internet use for a long time assumed a level of ephemerality, even if there was the persistence of the particular content. What we're racing to right now is that there's more and more awareness of the persistence of a lot of this.
And so you see the rise of tools like signal, right,

which part of the joy is not like, oh, I want to use this to do illicit things.

It's like, I want this to go away because it shouldn't be persistent.

It doesn't need to be.

It's a bunch of poop emojis, right?

It's just funny at the moment.

And I think that there's a lot more empathy for the complexity of being seen. Click fast and save big.
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So, Dr. Boyd, I'd love to throw something new into the mix here.

We've so far been talking about what we can learn from the city to understand the digital settings we operate in. But I also want to bring up something that might make the metaphor just a little bit more complicated, which is that digital spaces seem to act at once like big cities and small towns, right? And I guess what I mean by that is, you know, the stereotype of the small town, and I grew up in a small town, is, you know, like you sort of can't escape being seen.
Everyone's going to know your business all the time. And so we have these sort of parallel phenomena, right, where you have the scale of the city, but then you also have the intimacy of the small town.
And how do we navigate that? And also, to your point, how do we sort of conceive of ideas like justice and how do we sort of, you know, create the world that we want to create while also navigating all of these different tensions at the same time? A teacher of a school doesn't really ever get to stop being a teacher when they leave the school, you know, in a small town. They run into their students at the grocery store.
They run into their students out in the park. And that's sort of part of a small town dynamic is that you have to constantly navigate these just different contexts.
And you can't really separate them. One of the beauties of city living is the ability to actually keep pretty discrete contexts.
But there's also moments, of course, where contexts collide. You suddenly run into a colleague at a gay bar, and you're like, whoa, I was not planning on outing myself at work, right? These are city-based context collapses.
Well, they're so much easier to happen online, right? And they show us how this, you know, dynamic of the privilege of being able

to separate out contexts and maintain different voices or different styles or different aspects

of our identity in different places, we don't get the opportunity to do that as easily. And we end

up more in that small town teacher experience, which is really hard for people, especially

more marginalized people who don't have to have a professional identity on themselves all the time. And so think about the ways in which we try to navigate anonymity offline.
Perhaps most famously is Alcoholics Anonymous, right? Which is this way of respecting the idea that in AA, even in a small town, I may know you, I may see you, and this we have delineated to say this is a separate space because it's for everybody's well-being, that we create this separate space. But we create these conditions of constant outing online that we don't allow that freedom.
And we see this constant fight because anonymity online

is seen as fundamentally bad. So it's interesting to see how we are navigating these distinctly and

how we expect people to constantly cope with context collapse, you know, whenever they go

online. And that's one of the things people are genuinely struggling with, which is why you're

seeing these different layers of retreat, to try to not have to constantly navigate those

Thank you. that's one of the things people are genuinely struggling with, which is why you're seeing these different layers of retreat, to try to not have to constantly navigate those collisions.
And are the challenges we're seeing online revealing something about us culturally? We want a solution to something that we're feeling the toxicity. We're acknowledging that there's a lot of cruelty out there, that there's just things that make us sort of horrified.

And so people do hope that ridding of anonymity would solve it. My hypothesis is that it won't, but that's not going to stop people from trying.
And just like with the city, there are times where things become darker. But usually the thing about that form of darkness, that form of toxicity, whether it's in the city or whether it's online, is it's reflecting back to us broader social structural issues, right? We usually have an easier time identifying them in the city.
You know, economic inequality, right? Different layers of not handling mental health or poverty, lack of job opportunities, for example. Well, the thing is, is that online, a lot of the toxicity we are seeing is also due to similar factors, right? But we don't identify them as much because we're not seeing what is often called the urban blight issues.

We're seeing it just in terms of toxicity, and so we think it's just individual bad actors rather than, you know, systemic degradation. So one of the things I'm most interested in right now is how this battle over anonymity plays out.
Yeah. Is it bad for the internet? Is it good for people on the internet? Because, you know, there's a really strong case for both.
Right. There's, you know, anonymity as permission, but also anonymity as protection.
Yes. And I personally have used anonymity as protection online.
You know, I've gone into incognito mode on my browser. I've used anonymous mode in Reddit.
And it's not because I'm searching something nefarious necessarily. Really? No, it's Googling myself.
No, it's really more because I know that there's cookies that can follow me. And so I want to try and cut some of those cookies off at the pass so I don't have ads that follow me.
I mean, maybe I'm searching something innocuous, like running shoes. I'll get ads that follow me around.
And that's more annoying and maybe a little bit creepy than anything. Yes.
But if I search something that's more personal, like let's say I get a medical diagnosis and I want to learn more about it, I don't want ads or information constantly surfacing that could remind me of something personal or painful. I don't want to feel like I'm in this informational Bermuda triangle that I can never escape.
You know, there are just some searches that I want to be fleeting and ephemeral. Oh, that's such a good point.
So anonymity is also kind of permission to evolve, right? And to sort of move through life and, yeah, not have every stage follow you. Yeah, that's a great way to put it.
And then I guess I'm thinking, too, of sort of the other side of anonymity, which, you know, as a journalist, as you might imagine, journalists often get a lot of hate mail. Yes, unfortunately, very common.
So most of the time I will say I just don't engage. If someone doesn't have anything productive to say, I'm just I'm not going to go there.
But a couple of times I've gotten these really nasty, just invective-filled notes from people who are either anonymous or sort of quasi-anonymous, but seem to feel like they are somehow protected in whatever they're going to tell me. And I will respond to them sometimes.
Oh, interesting. Yeah.
And it is actually kind of a fascinating experiment because when I get a response, which is actually fairly often when I do those replies, people will respond seeming almost shocked, A, that they've gotten a response, B, that there was in fact a human on the other side of that email and their tone just changes instantly.

And there have been a couple of times when I've had, you know, not like completely deep back and forth with these people, but like where we actually have then gone on to have some kind of exchange, you know, meaningful exchange based on this terrible email that started things off. I think that it's such a kind of reminder of how little it takes to sort of nudge people back into humanity.
Just even, you know, in this case, one reply, and that's all it took, and then everything changes. And it's something I think a lot about when it comes to the web overall, and, you know, especially as we're building out the web's infrastructure is how can we maximize empathy and humanity really within these digital spaces it's tricky because you know we've created it as these these spaces that are controlled and they're economically you know managed in particular in particular ways, you know, yes, the individuals are, you know, co-constructing these systems, absolutely.
But they're doing it within an environment that has been defined for, you know, value extraction, not necessarily for pleasure or justice or other values that we might put forward. And so I think

that there's, like, honestly, I think we're at a precipice of, like, what is that future that we're

going to move towards? I don't think that the present is going to stand. The question is,

is it going to get much worse? Or are we going to find a new path forward that's more constructive?

I think as an individual, you know, part of it is start modeling the world you want to live in, right? And really think through your own actions and what you're doing, you know, collectively. Because that's the thing about a city is that, you know, what does it mean to maintain morality? And not necessarily in a religious sense, but in a way of recognizing the dignity and humanity of the collective.
Megan, I know I'm stating the obvious, but cities are simply incredibly nuanced, complex places. You know, they've been built up over time.
They have cultural histories that have really shaped them over decades and centuries. So I'm just not sure it's going to be as simple as taking the recipe of what makes up all the good things about urban life and just transferring them over to digital life.
Yeah, yeah, sadly. Yeah, but it is really helpful to think about the internet as an actual place rather than this enigmatic kind of other world that people have no agency over.
And it's something that actually we can control and create and shape. You know, we can approach digital spaces with a little bit more skepticism or curiosity and sort of always be asking ourselves, why is this place designed in this particular way? And then especially, how could it be better? Yeah, you know, it's sometimes it's scary that these norms and these rules, they just haven't been formed yet.

But I guess the upshot is, is that we still have a chance to create these norms.

And I think along those lines, it's actually really helpful to descale as much as we can.

You know, to think in terms of smaller communities, smaller groups of people, the neighborhoods that make the city. That's all for this episode of How to Know What's Real.
This episode was hosted by Andrea Valdez and me, Megan Garber. Our producer is Natalie Brennan.
Our editors are Claudine Abade and Jocelyn Frank. Fact check by Anna Alvarado.
Our engineer is Robz Merciak. Rob also composed some of the music for this show.
The executive producer of audio is Claudine Abade, and the managing editor of audio is Andrea Valdez. Next time on How to Know What's Real.
Our brains pay a lot of attention to emotion.

They pay a lot of attention to morality. When you smoosh them together, then it's this kind of superpower of getting us to just really focus in on that information.

What we can learn about the web's effects on people's brains and our ability to discern real from fake.

We'll be back with you on Monday. are in the show notes for this episode.
Or you can search your podcast app for How to Know What's

Real. This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend, edited by Claudina Bade,

and engineered by Rob Smersiak. Claudina Bade is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio,

and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I'm Hannah Rosen.
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