Sitting round the fire as our way to build community

We’ve been sitting round the fire for a long time. Image – iStock

I am going to start way back before history began. In the distant past, we can imagine the group huddled around the fire at the mouth of the cave. Together, as one. No lofty philosophical discussions, but some exchange of ideas. The younger members would learn to listen to their wise elders. And to be careful to express their own views in a respectful manner, conscious that expulsion from the group, from the cave, from the sharing of food resources, could be fatal. They might also notice how very old members of the group sometimes began to speak nonsense, and they would reflect on the great arc of human existence from lowly infant and childhood beginnings through powerful, authoritative and perhaps wise middle years to the deterioration of old age.

As a biologist interested in animal behavior and in evolution, and as someone firmly convinced that humans are animals, I am fascinated by our behavior, and how that behavior leads to societal structure. I am also fascinated by how our behavior is changing rapidly at the present time; a process driven largely by the technological developments in social media taking place at breakneck speed without much concern for how these developments are impacting our lives. Perhaps I am alarmist, but I am not convinced that all the innovations being provided by Google, Meta, X, You Tube and like companies are untrammeled goods for humanity.

Here I will focus on how we form social groups, and how that process has been altered by the advent of the web and search and social media. In a subsequent post I will home in on how the design of social media is reducing our native ability to think and reason. As for the advent of AI – count me among those who are terrified of what we are imposing on ourselves for no real reason except to make some media companies and their leaders insanely rich.

Meanwhile, back in that cave

So, back to that cave so long ago. This gathering round the fire, this fellowship, provided group cohesion, continuity of action and policy, and a clear signal about who the members of the group were. It was true social learning and it moved humans beyond being creatures that gave parental care, to animals able to expand affiliative responses beyond the immediate family, building strength in numbers, group cohesion and the possibility of cultural evolution.

True, my social group would as often as not look down upon your social group, even do battle with your group, when competition for territory or resources reared its head. But the antagonism that sometimes occurred between neighboring groups was a small price to pay for the group cohesion, extending beyond immediate kin, that such behavior engendered within the social group.

We still socialize and learn this way. Children learn from their parents without carefully crafted lesson plans, and members of communities learn much about expectations and benefits of belonging. The fragmentation of social groups caused by the greater mobility of many individuals in advanced societies dampens the effectiveness of this group learning as it erodes connection to place, but it also facilitates some bridging of differences among groups as individuals move amongst them.

Of course, there is one big difference between our modern age and that cave so long ago. In modern societies we belong to more than one fireside group, often to many groups, and we learn from each, while gaining the security of belonging to each.

The internet and social media have made it possible to belong to social groups that never come together around a fire. These groups are so large and widely distributed that, were they to come together, they would present logistic challenges to the hosting members, plus enormous costs of travel for other members.

But I think we need a reset. I think that in our enthusiasm for creating new types of group to which we can belong, we have inadvertently created mechanisms that are undermining our capacity to build effective societies. This has happened because we have relied on the marketplace, as we do for most things, to provide these new groups. The marketplace does not always act in ways that fulfill our real needs without causing damage. I’ll develop this idea more fully in the follow-up post.

The way in which our enthusiasm for new and different social structures is playing out is fascinating for three reasons. First, its lack of careful preplanning is typical of evolutionary change and this is in every sense an evolutionary change in human societies. Second, it is happening at astonishing speed, even for normally rapid cultural evolution, and the bad consequences are piling up creating problems that risk becoming existential. Third, the possible futures, if we can succeed in overcoming the bad consequences before they overwhelm us, promise significant enhancement of the quality of human existence.

Individuals belong to social groups of several types

Let’s start at the beginning. What is it about sitting round the fire? Why are we rewarded by that experience? We may never know, but the simple answer is that social groups that did not feel rewarded by spending time in each other’s company failed to persist because they did not develop the affiliative responses that ensured members worked together effectively.

Why the fire? Well, why not. A fire provides a visual focus that is constantly changing and therefore continuously visually stimulating. We can be glued to the flickering flames in exactly the same way we seem to be glued to waves crashing on a beach, to the constantly varying yet symmetrical patterns thrown up by a kaleidoscope, and even the ever-changing feed on our social media. We are visual animals, and constantly refreshing visual stimuli attract our attention. Sitting round the fire, immersing in the experience of the fire, we become able to interact with each other in non-threatening ways. We build social bridges not based initially on reproductive, parental, or agonistic urges although all of these may come into play as the social group continues to sit together. And those social bridges lead to cooperative behavior and greater group cohesion. This line of thinking might satisfy the need for an explanation of why we evolved the fireside chat. But something else is needed to explain the proliferation of social groupings within a society. Why do humans sit around so many different fires?

I suspect that this tendency to belong to multiple groups was a logical consequence of the explosive social development that sitting round the fire led to: elaborated communication, planning of future activities instead of just remembering past events, specialization among the members of the society so that subsets were working on different projects between visits to the fireside. The hunting subgroup, the fishing subgroup, and the gathering subgroup would have need to talk amongst themselves in greater detail than they might talk in the larger fireside group. We don’t need a lot of imagination to visualize the evolution of specialized guilds that worked to improve the practice of their particular crafts and also built traditions and mysteries that made belonging to that guild special. People today belong to many workplace-related groups, and in most cases, the individuals get pleasure from belonging to these groups. We can call them the practicing or practical groups.

A less obvious question is why humans concern themselves with questions about the nature of the universe, about why things are the way they are, and about whether we can understand the cosmic forces, fates, spirits and gods that make things happen the way they do. But we do aspire to understand the world in which we live, and it is easy to see the development of specialized sects that seek to develop such understanding. Those sects may be religious, magical, philosophical or scientific in how they advance understanding, but each will attract members of the wider society that view the universe in particular ways. Collectively they can be termed the wondering groups. Finally, there are the groups of humans who seek to advance the arts and literature – the creative groups. These likely started as practicing groups of artists and artisans but came to attract other members that appreciated the arts but only rarely produced them. In many cases, these groups may overlap with, or be contained entirely within certain other groups because the arts and literature are our way of portraying our understanding. It would not be surprising to find strong links between specific trends in the arts and literature and discourse within other subgroups set up within a workplace, or to explore questions of religion, magic, philosophy or science.

Finally there is the issue of play. Most technologically advanced societies today believe that they have time in excess of that needed to obtain the resources permitting a successful life. They believe they have more excess time than did people in the past, although that is probably a false conclusion distorted by the difficult living conditions of the working class in early 20^th century developed countries. Outside this world, in less technologically advanced societies, the provision of resources necessary to support a society may even have required less time per capita than is the case in technologically advanced societies today. Anthropologists have documented that in many hunter gatherer societies today, individuals have substantially more leisure time than is the case among working class members of advanced societies who put in their 40-hour weeks plus commuting time. People devote some of this excess time to play.

People have always played as adults as well as in childhood, but perhaps only in technologically advanced societies has it been deemed necessary to put play and work into separate categories and to alot time to each. And with the carving out of play as a separate kind of activity it has been possible to develop groups that play in different ways at different games and using different tools and rules – the playful groups.

To summarize, apart from the primal fireside group – a political/economic  group encompassing all members of the society, and a group which has had its own separate evolution as we have formed ever larger social groups – there are the practicing groups, the wondering groups, the creative groups and the playful groups.

An individual could belong to groups of all types, and to multiple groups of any one type, while still being a member of the all-encompassing fireside or political/economic group. There are opportunities, frequent or less frequent, for individuals of each such group to interact with each other in the same way as when our ancestors sat around the fire.

Problems caused by our enthusiasm for joining social groups

Until quite recently our enthusiasm for joining groups was limited by the small number of local groups, and by the need to be physically present when meeting with the group. While written language and the possibility of sending messages across vast distances expanded the array of social groups potentially available for joining, the difficulties of long-distance communication reduced the cohesion of such groups. In my own life, as I moved from one continent to another, I shed numerous friends and acquaintances as well as formal membership of many groups. Even my mother came in time to refer to ‘all the family’ as in “we had all the family to dinner last week” meaning ‘all except me’ after I had separated myself from the rest of them by an ocean plus a continent.

The advent of the internet, with its near-instant communication across space, gave the appearance of greatly expanded possibilities for widely dispersed groups and the evolution from clunky, text-only, early email to the graphically-rich social media platforms of today has, at least superficially, made long-distance groups more and more like the groups formed among individuals of a local social group – the members of the same fireside circle.

The covid shutdowns jolted many of us to the realization that groups that did not meet in person were far less satisfying than ones that did. The web makes it possible to sustain a group that meets only rarely in person, but it does not seem to eliminate the need for personal contact completely.

Suddenly we find ourselves able to join many more groups than would have been possible just a decade or so ago. Many of these web-based groups have only loose connections to the day-to-day activities of their members. They are a proliferation of ways to play. And, at least initially, the various groups seem equally inviting and rewarding. All could have been well except for the fact that it costs money to set up and maintain a group distributed across the world yet seamlessly communicating among its members. And with money comes the marketplace.

Social media began as ways for individuals with like interests to come together effectively no matter how far apart they were on the planet. But they were sold as free to members largely because of the prevailing view in the heady early years of the web that non-physical web-based products should cost nothing to be made available to all. Inevitably, individual creators and corporations sought to derive income from the social media they were producing, promoting and managing. Thus was born the business model that said, create a product individuals want to join, and then deliver paid advertising to them while they engage with the product.

It was easy to argue to users that the advertising could be selected to cover only opportunities the particular individual might be most likely to want. Advertising thus became another benefit of joining the social media group, rather than an interference one had to put up with.  Meanwhile, to potential marketers, the opportunity to advertise could be marketed as a cost-effective way of getting ads in front of an audience selected as most likely to be interested. The cleverness of this sleight of hand by the managers of social media needs to be admired. No individual joining Facebook or Twitter joins because of the value of curated advertising – the advertising is an unwanted interference with the social connections being sought, but it is accepted because, well, ‘at least it is curated to my interests.’

All might have been well if the entrepreneurs who invented social media had been content to build an app and not continue to tinker with it to make it better. Entrepreneurs rarely approach life in such an unambitious way – they work to make the app better, and better really means better for the advertisers who pay the bills. Every social medium now in operation is constantly being managed by its owners to make it a more effective instrument for delivering advertising to those individuals most likely to respond to the particular ad, while also making the apparent rewards to members – the stuff they get to experience by putting up with all the advertising – ever more enticing so they remain on line and connected for as long as possible. Social media apps are constantly being reworked to capture more information about each user so that advertising can be more precisely targeted, while also becoming stickier – harder to leave – for users. Few users realize that they typically remain within the social media app while ostensibly searching elsewhere on the internet unless they take steps to shut down the social media app before starting the search. Everything you do on the web is usually being tracked, often by multiple social media apps, assuming you are active to some degree on several of them.

It is easy to see the effectiveness of targeting by those who deliver online advertising. Just observe your social media feed in the days before and the days after you spend a few moments looking for opportunities for a tropical vacation or a new pair of jeans. Ads for the particular type of product will surge following your search. Kind of silly really, assuming your initial search for vacations or jeans was successful, because you are probably not going to want to buy a second vacation or pair of pants quite so soon! (I may be naive here – perhaps lots of us do want to buy more than one vacation or pair of jeans at a time!)

It is less easy to see the extensive array of information being collected about each of us to make this targeting possible. Reading the fine print, which nobody does, when granting permissions can be an eye-opener. True, you can disrupt this targeting by clearing caches, minimizing cookies and other tricks, but you have to put up with a real loss of performance if you do so (because information about past internet travel can be very useful in getting your own next surf under way). All those autocompletions of text being entered, all those suggested sites; they don’t come out of thin air. They happen because the search engines know what you have previously looked for.

And then there is the curating of the information presented to users of social media – the material you go to the site to see. With millions of items being posted per minute it is impossible for you to see everything, but to keep you interacting with the site, the stream of items you receive has to be enticing for you. Again, all that information being collected about you is used to identify items you are most likely to be interested in. And people in the business of generating traffic know how to structure items to maximize interest.

Some of this curating is pretty obvious. Facebook members tend to see lots of posts from their ‘friends’ plus some stuff from other people. Other curating is much less visible. For example, many people still believe that a search engine like Google conducts comprehensive, unbiased searches. But do this simple test: using your own device search for information on any topic. Next have a friend use the exact same search string on his/her device. Each of you will get pages of links. Many of the links will be the same but not all of them, and they won’t appear in the same order. Because Google delivers links in the order it judges will be of most interest to you. If your chosen test topic was a controversial one, and if your friend has differing views to you, you will have received radically different sets of suggested links because Google judges you to be most interested in links to information compatible with your own views.

Many people like me, who had long used Twitter noticed dramatic changes in the feed of posts they received as Twitter morphed into X and as Elon Musk became more and more enamored with the far right. In my case the change in curating was sufficient to drive me away from the site – not the response Musk desired, but an illustration of how curation plays a role in keeping members actively engaged with the social media site.

Let’s summarize again. Social media apps have evolved to feed their users with information most likely to keep them linked to and interacting with the site. They do this in order to feed targeted advertising to each user because they sell opportunities to marketers based on that targeting and the number of users delivered to. At the same time, many individuals posting items of information to the social media app – your fellow users – have learned how to make their posts particularly enticing to other users.

We are so effectively captured by our social media that we can be unaware of our surroundings or the people we are with. Photo by Creative Christians on Unsplash.

This is a great way of creating a captive pool of users, spending hours of each day connected to and interacting with that particular social media site. It does that by manipulating the information stream to deliver what you are most likely to want. But this is not a great way of delivering unbiased, accurate information about the world to masses of users. Just the opposite. It pushes users into various echo chambers that are filled by often quite distinctively different information – the facts, alternative facts, and fake news that now obstruct serious discourse across communities. This lack of objectivity would be acceptable if people remembered that social media never promised to convey truth. But people do not remember that and they are so busy attending to these enticing, even addictive, media, they have little time left to seek out unbiased information on the world around them.

Now do you see why I am worried about the way our use of social groups is evolving? Next time I’ll reflect on the ways social media and the web are reducing our connection to what might be called reality or the truth.

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