We Should All Know More About Each Other

If you know me well, you know I probably don’t read as much as I should (university seminar readings are the best example), but recently, I rediscovered a New York Times opinion piece that went mega-viral a few years ago. 

It went viral the way opinion pieces tend to. Everyone shares it, only half of them read it and only a quarter of them actually understood it. Its title was no doubt provocative: We Should All Know Less About Each Other.

At first glance, the title alone feels almost heretical. We live in the twenty-first century, an age that treats openness as unquestionably good. More information, more transparency and more visibility are usually presented as signs of societal progress. Yet I found Michelle Goldberg's argument surprisingly persuasive. The internet, she argues, has made us far too visible to one another. Previously, generations were largely spared the daily experience of encountering strangers' worst opinions, most irritating habits and most extreme representatives. We aren’t, which sucks. Also, I think there’s something ironic about building the most sophisticated communication tool in human history and its primary use is being wrong on a mammoth scale but that’s a chat for another day. 

Why Being Right isn’t Enough

If you’ve ever spent more than five minutes on social media, it isn’t exactly difficult to see her point. There has never been a time when so many people have had such immediate access to so many others. Yet rather than bringing us closer together as expected, she makes the case that this constant exposure often seems to breed irritation, suspicion and contempt. Talk about unintended consequences. 

More often than not, social media seems to prove her point. Open any app and you are immediately bombarded by strangers’ political rants, a screenshot of an argument you were never involved in, or a viral post designed to make you see red. Through the design of the algorithm, entire communities are defined by their most obnoxious members rather than the median. The result is not understanding but rather the opposite, irritation.

Goldberg’s diagnosis here captures something legitimate. Yet after reading her piece, I found myself wondering whether we have misdiagnosed the problem. I began to wonder whether the issue was actually whether we know too much about each other. What, instead, if the problem is that we have forgotten what it means to ‘know’ one another at all? After all, there must be a difference between information and understanding, right?

Let me explain this idea in practice rather than simply being an abstract philosophical case. I know what music my friends listen to because Spotify tells me (I won’t say what it is to save them the embarrassment). I know what films they are watching because Letterboxd tells me. (Same principle applies, but there are some real MLP lovers out there. You know who you are.) I know their opinions on current affairs because Instagram makes their opinions impossible to avoid. Yet, I am not convinced I know them ‘better’ as a result.

There’s no denying that the modern world has given us unprecedented access to one another’s lives, but you wouldn’t be mistaken in arguing that much of that access is superficial. Due to the nature of the media we consume, we encounter fragments detached from context and from the political opinions that produced them. Too often, it’s a photograph without the context that preceded it. As a result, we tend to mistake visibility for genuine understanding.

Perhaps this is why contemporary life can feel so paradoxical. We have never known so much about one another, yet loneliness remains widespread (just ask Lauv). We are surrounded by countless amounts of information about other people, yet we often feel disconnected from them. We know the surface of countless lives and the depths of very few.

Here, I think it would be beneficial to draw on the work of philosopher Buber from 1923. It has aged like fine wine and the distinction between treating people as “I-It” and “I-Thou” is a useful analogy to link back to here. In the first relationship, another person becomes an object, i.e., something to be categorised, understood and placed into a certain conceptual box. In the second, they remain fully human, irreducible to any single description. The distinction, despite being over a century old, feels increasingly relevant. Much of modern life encourages us to encounter others merely as collections of traits. Their politics, their profession. Their demographics. Their online persona (Instagram likes when doomscrolling count by the way).

Yet it is simply folly to argue that human beings are as simple as the categories we assign them. At university, this becomes blatantly obvious. King’s prides itself on being a melting pot of people from different countries, religions, backgrounds and political views. Walk through Strand and you pass thousands of separate lives intersecting for a very, very brief moment before continuing on their separate trajectories. It is all too tempting to think we can quickly understand those around us. We’re all too guilty of hearing an accent and imagining a biography. We discover somebody’s degree and infer their interests and competence. We learn their political opinion and construct a set of values that the acquaintance holds dear.

But these assumptions rarely survive prolonged exposure. The person you initially dismissed as ‘too arrogant’ turns out to be shyer than you ever could have anticipated. The person you assumed had everything figured out is struggling majorly behind the scenes. The person whose politics seem incomprehensible begins to make more sense once you understand their upbringing and their identity. Note that this doesn’t necessarily make it more agreeable. It doesn’t make it correct. But it does make it easier to understand.

The Stranger is never just a Stranger

This is where I link to a slightly unexpected book. It is here that I find myself thinking about Mrs Dalloway.

For those who haven’t had the pleasure of reading the aforementioned novel, Woolf’s writing follows people as they move through a single day in London. On the surface, very little seems to happen (aside from the unfortunate tragedy befalling Septimus Smith (all-time name by the way)). Characters walk through streets, attend parties and buy flowers. Yet beneath these ordinary actions, Woolf provides the extraordinary depth of interior life. Every passing stranger carries memories, anxieties and private narratives that are completely invisible to those around them. Two people can occupy the same city, the same street, even the same room, while inhabiting conflicting emotional worlds.

What makes Mrs Dalloway so striking to the reader is its implicit insistence that ordinary people are not ordinary at all. Every life possesses a richness that remains largely hidden from public view. Upon reading Woolf, one becomes painfully aware of how little we usually know about one another. The stranger sitting opposite you on the tube has experienced years of joys and failures you could never comprehend. The student beside you in a seminar has fears and ambitions that are indiscernible from the outside. The lecturer standing at the front of the room has a history that extends far beyond their professional role. Every person contains vastly more than the fragments through which we encounter them, no matter how much time we spend with them. 

Question: Is Exposure understanding? 

This, I think, is where I have to part company with Goldberg. I’m honestly surprised it took this long. Remember that Michelle Goldberg is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the NYT. I am a university student who has just finished his first year and doesn’t have an internship lined up for this summer. Make of that what you will.

Her essay suggests that too much visibility can erode social trust. In all likelihood, she’s probably right. But her definition of visibility, as she describes it, is not genuine knowledge in my eyes. In her mind, it is exposure to fragments. The problem is not that we know too much about one another. It is that we encounter each other in forms that flatten complexity rather than reveal it. To use an earlier example, social media is particularly bad at conveying interiority. It does excel at broadcasting opinions and identities. An area where it is less successful is in communicating uncertainty, contradiction and growth. Yet those qualities are often the most important parts of a person. The result, upon further examination, is a peculiar kind of social blindness. We become increasingly informed about people while becoming less curious about them. This matters politically as well as personally. Many contemporary debates are fuelled by caricature. We imagine that people belong neatly to ideological tribes. We assume that a single opinion reveals an entire moral character. We learn just enough about one another to judge, but not enough to understand.

On a related note, I think there is something quietly dehumanising about the speed at which people become representatives of categories rather than what they should be classed as, individuals. We encounter someone online, or even in passing conversation and within seconds, they are processed not as a person with a particular history, but as an example of a group: a political position, a demographic label, a cultural stance. Once that happens, the individual tends to disappear behind the category. If you watch out for it, you’ll notice it too. 

Understanding, of course, is not the same thing as agreement. Knowing more about somebody does not require approving of their views. It does not demand abandoning criticism or pretending that all disagreements are misunderstandings. Some disagreements are real and important. But fundamentally, I would make the case that understanding changes the nature of disagreement. It is much easier to hate an abstraction than a person. It is easier to dismiss a category than an individual. Once somebody becomes a fully realised human being rather than a symbol, simplistic judgements, whether for better or worse, become harder to sustain.

Stop Retreating into the Familiar 

This is why some of the most meaningful experiences at university happen outside the classroom. A conversation after a society event. An unexpected friendship in the halls. A discussion that continues long after a seminar has ended. These moments rarely change the world. Yet they change how we see it. They remind us that most people are more complicated, more interesting and more understandable than they initially appear. University is one of the few places where this remains possible on a large scale. 

Thousands of people with radically different experiences are thrown together and invited to share intellectual and social space. That opportunity is easy to waste. We can retreat into familiar friendship groups and interact primarily with people who already think like us. Many of us do. Yet something valuable is lost when we do. One of the most important forms of education does not occur through lectures or reading lists. It occurs through sustained encounters and improved tolerance with other people. The student from a different country. The flatmate with a different faith. The friend whose assumptions challenge your own. These relationships complicate the stories we tell ourselves about the world. They make us less certain, but often more understanding.

Stop Watching, Start Knowing

Perhaps Goldberg is right that excessive visibility has produced new forms of social hostility. Perhaps there are things we genuinely would be better off not knowing about one another. I certainly do not need to see every stranger’s most impulsive thought immortalised online. But the answer is not to know less about each other. The answer is to know each other differently. The tragedy of modern life is not that strangers know too much about one another. It is that they often know just enough to judge and not nearly enough to understand. We have never had greater access to other people, yet we have never been so deprived of genuine knowledge of them. 

We don’t need fewer windows into each other’s lives. We need to stop mistaking the glass for the view. 

With that, I rest my case.