Let’s start here:
For a moment around the year 2000, one sound dominated the living rooms of “cool” families in the United States. The quick but distinct buh-bup! of the TiVo remote was a status symbol of the technologically advanced, ushering people out of the dark ages of recording their shows to VHS tapes and into a brand new world of DVR. People had been manipulating time to benefit their consumption for decades - from mixtapes on cassette to those oft-overwritten VHS tapes sitting in the media cabinet below the TV. But those old methods required preparation. TiVo was right there, pausing the ostensibly live action at the press of a button. Its tagline? You run the show. And while it did feel like you were running the show through well-timed buh-bups, there was one aspect of TiVo that acted as the canary in a coal mine of a future run by someone else: each box featured an algorithm that could recommend shows for you based on what you were watching & saving.¹
Our relationship with time today is a lot different than it was when TiVo debuted at CES in 1999. Back then, tools for manipulating time were emerging but we still controlled them and determined how they affected our lives. Today, the way time is altered by others plays a major part in how we see the world. In part one of our series, we discussed how our Solocultures are representative of what we choose to consume as well as what algorithms, AI, and others choose to share with us. Today, let’s talk about how the time we consume things changes our Solocultures as well. Time, for better or worse, has gone from indisputable fact to foggy outline. And it’s in that fogginess that we lose connection.
Defining time’s role in the loss of connection can be abstract, so in an attempt to quantify the fogginess we asked 500 Americans aged 16-64 to help us better understand their current relationship with time. The results mirror our research around personal bubbles published in part 1, proving that time is an important factor when it comes to how people relate to the world around them:
The vast majority of Americans feel a disconnect with time on a semi-frequent basis, a feeling that has increased over time. Nearly 8 in 10 people say they feel disconnected from time at least sometimes, and 18% say they always feel disconnected from time. 44% say they feel more disconnected from time than they used to, and only 10% feel less disconnected. Single and self-employed people are more likely to feel disconnected from time more frequently than others, while women of all ages and people living in rural areas are more likely to feel much more disconnected than they have previously. These results mirror the learnings in our last Study Guide that found these groups feel more in a bubble than others.
The majority of Americans feel like the world around them has sped up. 59% say the world is faster than ever before, compared to only 4% who feel time is moving slower. The age group most likely to say time is moving faster is people aged 45-64, the same age group who were most likely to say they feel like they are living in their own bubble more than ever before.
Technology is unsurprisingly the top reason people are struggling with time, but it also helps some stay connected as well. “Technology has made things go much faster and sometimes it's overwhelming,” one person told us. Another said that “There’s simply so much more information and data available that makes [the world] seem faster.” Some people admitted that without their phones they wouldn’t easily know the day of the week or the date, and others said that they have trouble remembering when certain conversations occurred at home or at work without their device. This co-dependence is something we’ll dig into a bit today.
There are some arguments that time is standing still culturally, or that we are stuck in the now because of fears for the future and an inability to collectively acknowledge the past.² Based on this study and additional research, we believe that instead of standing still, time has become malleable at the individual level, like a TiVo for how we interact with the world. Time has never been less concrete, and there are countless ways this impacts our Solocultures. Today, we’ll focus on two: 1) Recency bias is polluting our ability to create lasting cultural connections. 2) No one is consuming cultural transmissions at the same time as anyone else.
Our race to recap…
…things as soon as they happen for the sake of content is impressive. If, as one survey respondent put it, “The world is a 24 hour operation these days,” then nowstalgia occupies hours 25-48. How often do you open Hulu and see that 20/20 has a new “Special Report” about a thing that happened about three days ago? Did you see Dumb Money, the movie from 2023 recapping the Gamestop short squeeze of 2021 based on a book written & published that same year? Did you watch the Emmys the other night (unlikely) or did you watch the near-instantaneous recaps and highlights that someone compiled and posted across social media (much more likely)? What about your Spotify Wrapped and its myriad copycats that remind you of what just happened and solidify it in custom infographics for you to share? No wonder 6 in 10 Americans feel like time is moving faster - the world around them is being recapped at warp speed.
This type of recency bias when it comes to the stories we choose to remember endangers culture in the long term. For one, Nowstalgia content puts a too-cute bow on a short period of time, solidifying the final results by closing the loop without accounting for the still-shifting sands below. What might a Dumb Money movie look like in 20 years when we know the long-tail impact the retail investing craze had on the market and the legacy of all the players in the story? Alternatively, think of the TV shows that memory-holed COVID as quickly as possible in their storylines and how that helped minimize the realities of the ongoing pandemic for viewers.³ The time we choose to tell stories in culture can sometimes matter just as much as the content within them.⁴
Nowstalgia and recency bias also make culture more shallow. In the 2017 book The Acceleration of Cultural Change, authors R. Alexander Bentley and Michael J. O’Brien discuss the two shapes of cultural transmission and what they leave behind, what archaeologists call tradition and horizon. Historically, “traditions reach back in a deep and narrow fashion, through many generations of related people, usually residing over relatively small areas. Horizons are shallow and broad and can cover magnitudes more people over a much larger region.” The internet, according to the authors, put everything on a horizontal plane, testing our ability to cut out junk and keep the deep & narrow. “A viral video gets copied identically millions of times without being streamlined by the transmission process, and actually accumulates more junk in the form of comments and metadata,” they wrote. “Without the kind of vetting that has long typified cultural transmission, culture is bound to accumulate a lot of junk.”
It should come as no surprise that junk does not subculture or monoculture make, and that our increased content outputs over time threaten to keep us stuck in the horizon. As cited by Bentley and O’Brien, “historian Abby Smith Rumsey argued that vast amounts of digital information hinder our collective capacity for forgetting, which is an important behavioral trait that clears away informational clutter, making room for creative thought.” Without better methods of vetting what we consume, we lose the chance to create the connective tissue necessary to build broad societal stories and norms, allowing the tail of our immediate copycatting to eat itself, and creativity to die. You might feel this sensation when you see the 200th version of a dance on your FYP, or the same screenshotted meme from years ago; it might be that we’re developing new forms of information transmission, but it also might be that we’re running out of truly new creative thought. “I think we are distracted more than ever,” one survey respondent told us. “I often forget tasks when I get in front of a screen,” said another. “My teenage kids just sit on their phones even at the dinner table even when I say it’s a rule to not be on them,” one mom said. It’s clear that the immediacy of the junk is winning.
A mix of horizons and traditions signals a functioning system of cultural transmission. Nowstalgia threatens that function by shortening horizons and repeating them instead of letting them die off.
The context collapse…
…that comes from how we experience the immediacy of this junk as individuals on our own timeline makes it even more complicated to find connective tissue. Thanks to the way we each discover through our own habits and algorithms, no one person consumes cultural transmissions at the same moments, which means our understanding of reality has a totally different timeline than everyone else’s. A quick scroll of my TikTok FYP serves me videos that range from hours old to some posted last November. Even worse, my Explore page on Instagram sometimes recommends posts that are literally years old. Given the randomness of when we consume, context is infrequent, if there is any at all. Our study found that people without built-in networks feel this collapse the most: almost 50% of single people and those who are self-employed say they feel more disconnected than they have ever before.
That’s a core component of Soloculture: in some ways, we control our timeline, but in most cases, it’s influenced or controlled by machines whose mission is to keep us engaged, not connected or informed. We often lose track of time in our rabbit holes and become experts on topics that only exist to ourselves.⁵ The depth of our individual connections can actually make us more disconnected because that depth was not achieved via the same exact timeline as others. This is the reason spoiler alerts exist: to address the problems that arise when people consume content at different times.
For example, the way watching The West Wing impacted my worldview & Soloculture when it initially aired is vastly different than someone viewing it today based on the added weight of time they bring to the experience and the surrounding world in which they are choosing to watch the show. Back then, it felt like the show painted an optimistic picture of what American politics could be; today, someone watching for the first time likely recoils at instances of the show’s naiveté related to where the country has headed since it first aired. These are the opinions of people who have consumed the same content, but the way it interacts with the world today is different, and therefore the show impacts their Soloculture differently than it has mine.
To put it in the terms of Bentley and O’Brien, traditions can’t emerge if there’s no common time or place to reach back to. We attempt to re-anchor ourselves to time and place in various ways, like rewatch podcasts of popular shows and online forums that provide the contextual notes that have otherwise been lost over time. But the additional consumption required (“now I have to watch a show AND listen to a podcast about the show AND read a Subreddit about the show?”) creates a barrier to context that can feel insurmountable. At the end of the day, sometimes your consumption patterns mean your Soloculture won’t attach to others, and other times your consumption hits just right and you find common subcultures to attach to. It’s a lottery of chance that adds a significant layer of randomness to how connected we feel to the world around us at any given time.
Over time, our Solocultures may come in contact with others at different depths or speeds, building on existing subcultures or creating new ones that may eventually contribute to the monoculture. At the same time, subcultures fall out of favor and end up only being recognized by individuals.
Context or no context…
…the result of this timelessness is that we get to individually manage our own rate of cultural change by choosing to make as much time as we want for things that matter to us. We are free to dial up and down how long something exists in our world by retraining the algorithm with a few swipes, or by liberally blocking & muting that which doesn’t interest us. We get to determine how much we care about the recent past, or when our headspace is “right” to consume something in our queue. “We can snark about being addicted to our phones or worry about inflated screen-time numbers or the way we pull out our cameras to document moments we should instead be present for,” wrote Charlie Warzel recently, “but acknowledging the positives is equally disorienting—to do so suggests a certain unknowability about a technology we live with every day. What are our phones doing to us? A lot, it seems. Perhaps more than we realize.”⁶
Solocultures don’t exist solely because of our phones, but they are certainly a co-conspirator in our unmooring from time. We’ve all seen the viral photos of a sold-out concert lit by the phones of thousands recording the moment. Regardless of the quality of their recording, each person is doing so in the hopes that one day they can revisit that specific time. They don’t know when they’ll watch the clip again, but the time they choose will carry a personal meaning that no one else can truly connect to. A shared mono or subcultural experience, made Solo by the recollection of it. Will we find a way to make the good uses of our malleable chronologies outweigh the disconnects their existence creates? Only time will tell.
Next time: While our dabblings in time travel have almost completely eliminated the collective experience, there is one place where monoculture still reigns because time cannot be shifted. That place is the field of play, where real-time stats and scores force timely engagement. Sports may be the last monoculture in America, and in part 3 of our series, we’ll talk about why that is and how our Solocultural existence is changing the way sports are consumed & enjoyed.
¹ You’ll recall this period as one where control of the remote in the family unit was dictated by who could speed through commercials the fastest without missing any part of the show when it came back on.
² The WELL's 2024 State of the World included this quote that summarizes the link between our speed of culture and future's uncertainty: “I cannot shake the sense that we are rapidly outrunning our headlights, into unknown futures that will emerge outside of the cone of probability we thought bounded our world as deep change drivers upend comfortable assumptions of our earlier epoch.”
³ The levels of seriousness with which people treated and continue to treat COVID are a perfect example of building our own realities and how time impacts them. There are massive differences between how people suffering from pre-existing conditions or long COVID make time for the pandemic as part of their cultural landscape versus people who ignored initial guidelines or disregard its long-term impact. 2020 was a massive monocultural moment that became subculturally managed and ultimately Soloculturally determined.
⁴ David Grann's 2023 bestseller The Wager makes this distinction in its 5th and final act, following different factions of castaways from the book's namesake ship as they race to publish their own versions of history first. Despite it happening in the early 1740s, the recognition that each sailor needed to tell their narrative as soon as possible - in some cases to directly contradict the stories of others in order to further sow confusion in the narrative - was prescient.
⁵ Like the Roman Empires we discussed last time, being parodied in this TikTok for their specificity in the search for connection.
⁶ Warzel’s comments come in a piece describing how the Photo Shuffle feature of his iPhone helped him come to terms with the loss of his dog last summer. “Grief is not linear, and neither is Photo Shuffle,” he wrote. It’s no small thing that a feature on his phone allowed him to find his own timeline for grieving.
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