Shared Attention in the Age of AI

Last night, my young son stayed up far later than he should have.  We walked to a neighborhood gathering space to watch the Knicks. Families filled the room. Friends met after work. Strangers struck up conversations. My son ordered a special nonalcoholic drink and settled in to watch the game with everyone else.  At one point, the bartender showed him how to shake a mocktail. The adults cheered him on. The Knicks gave everyone something to talk about.  This morning, he was exhausted. But he also had a story to tell.  Walking home, I found myself staring at the skyline. Office towers glowed blue and orange. Buildings that ordinarily symbolize commerce, finance, and private ambition suddenly seemed engaged in a common project. The city itself appeared to be rooting for the Knicks. It was a small thing.  The Knicks have reached the NBA Finals and won Game One against the Spurs, and something unusual is happening across New York. Schools are holding spirit days. Strangers compare notes in elevators. Children wear blue and orange to class. Neighbors who rarely speak suddenly have something to say to one another. Office conversations begin with basketball rather than politics.  In an era when so much of our attention is fragmented, personalized, and fleeting, millions of New Yorkers are paying attention to the same thing at the same time.  The Knicks have not solved New York’s housing crisis. They have not fixed the subway. They have not lowered the temperature of our politics. Yet they have managed something increasingly rare: they have captured the shared attention of millions of people in a positive way.  For years, Americans have come together mainly in response to tragedy. New Yorkers rallied after September 11. Communities unite after hurricanes and floods. During COVID, we applauded healthcare workers from our windows. We know how to come together when things go wrong. What we have lost is the habit of coming together when things go right.  The excitement around the Knicks reveals something about modern life. Despite years of headlines about polarization, loneliness, and declining trust, the desire for community remains strong. People still want common experiences. The trouble is that opportunities for them have grown scarce.  Much of modern life pushes us toward the individual. We stream personalized entertainment, scroll customized feeds, shop alone online, and spend more time with screens than with neighbors.  Artificial intelligence promises to accelerate all of it. It will tailor our news, our entertainment, even our companionship ever more precisely to each of us. Chatbots now offer friendship on demand. Algorithms assemble a different world for every user. Synthetic interaction increasingly stands in for the shared kind. The more precisely technology learns what each of us wants, the less likely any two of us are to want the same thing at once. Much of this will make life easier, but a feed built for one cannot give us the experience of watching the same thing, at the same moment, as everyone around us.  Human beings do not simply want personalized experiences. We want shared ones.  The French sociologist Émile Durkheim called moments of collective excitement and solidarity “ collective effervescence ”—occasions when people stop feeling like isolated individuals and feel part of something larger. Religious services can create it. National celebrations can create it. Community festivals can create it. Apparently, so can a Knicks championship run.  The insight is not about basketball. It is about belonging. Millions of New Yorkers who will never meet understand what those colors mean and know that others are watching too. In an age of fragmented attention, that is no small thing.  Sports are one of the few remaining arenas where people of different ages, backgrounds, religions, occupations, and political views gather around a common experience. You do not have to agree with the person beside you to high-five them when Brunson hits a three.  We spend enormous energy describing how technology divides us, and far less building the things that still unite us. Schools, cities, houses of worship, and neighborhood spaces should deliberately create shared rituals, not leave them to a lucky playoff run, but build, on purpose, the occasions a city once produced on its own.  The Knicks may win the title or lose it, and most cities, most years, get no run at all. But the point was never the trophy. A team can lose in the Finals and still hand a city a month of shared attention—watch parties, packed bars, neighbors with something to say. Losing together is still together.  My son many not remember the final score. He will remember staying up too late, learning to shake a mocktail, and cheering alongside strangers who shared nothing but a team. That is not a distraction from civic life, it’s where civic life begins again.  The post Shared Attention in the Age of AI appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI .