Last night I ventured to Fenway Park. The trip fit my frugality well: there’s free street parking, if you know where to look, I had a free ticket, thanks to a raffle win at work, and the beer and peanuts only set me back $18.75(!). It didn’t quite fit my lingering fear of crowds. I don’t tend to like being where a lot of people are; and, if loads of people are doing something, I tend to shy away. When I see a line, my first thought isn’t: “there must be something good there”, it’s more like: “those people are all making a terrible mistake.” Thankfully, the modern Fenway has a lot of concourse walkways and it manages to hold thirty-odd thousand souls a lot better than it used to.
Midway through the game, during one of the uncountable commercial breaks, the stadium cameras found a man on his knee, about to propose. His girlfriend at first was looking away and he seemed a bit flustered by this. The crowd began to cheer a bit, trying to help him get her attention. As she turned around and figured out what was happening (first proposal, then jumbotron) we saw that delightfully human moment: “my boyfriend is doing this now!? And here!?” Our man saved the situation by saying something sweet, a tear came to her eye, she said yes, and the crowd swelled with cheers. Even thinking about it now, the moment gives me chills. Where else do we cheer an old-fashioned engagement? How many of these moments have been cancelled for the last two years? (How many sporting event bros are sadly un-engaged?)
Upon consideration, our closest digital analog for Fenway’s crowd cheering a marriage proposal is social media. If posted to Upworthy, or wherever, the same video would get some likes and shares. But how different are the likes from the cheers? One makes your heart swell with emotion: you’re proud of humanity; the other is just pixels on a screen.
We’ve been turned on to screens for ten or twenty years. And it’s not looking too good: they’re causing our shared life to take a turn. That’s not super original, but this week’s first read from Jonathan Haidt digs in a little deeper to turn up some reasons why we’ve crossed a rubicon and what to do about it now.
The next two readings are a bit about where crowds can go wrong. First, a razor-sharp insight from Michael Lind about how institutions shape our discourse and ideas for the worse, by narrowing and flattening the boundaries of acceptable thought. The last link is another in a series of truly frightening pieces, not all from James Pogue, but his is a good entry: the strange crowd comprising the new world of the American Right.
