Us and Them

How Life in the Digital World Is Changing Our Sense of Belonging and Connection

Two people live in the same apartment building. Every morning, they meet in the elevator, exchange polite greetings, and occasionally make small talk about the weather or the building management.

One thinks the other is a little grumpy. The other finds his neighbor's constant phone conversations irritating. That's about as far as their acquaintance goes.

But in the evening, both enter another world. Their digital lives begin: social media, online forums, communities devoted to philosophy, science, and entertainment.

One logs into an astronomy forum as Orion. The other goes by Kepler. They spend hours discussing the universe, arguing about dark matter, and exchanging links to scientific papers. They've been doing this for years. They look forward to each other's messages and think of themselves as something close to friends.

Neither has the slightest idea that they live next door to each other.

Of course, I made this story up. But does it really sound so unlikely today?

I have several people in my own life whom I met online and whose messages I genuinely look forward to. We discuss questions about life, philosophy, our ways of understanding the world, and whatever else catches our interest. For all I know, one of them could live in my building. Perhaps even on my floor.

Yet in the elevator, we would be practically strangers. Online, we would feel like kindred spirits. The very same people.

We are used to dividing the people around us into "us" and "them." But what actually makes someone one of us? A shared past? Years spent together? Common interests? Similar beliefs? Or the trust that develops gradually, sometimes for reasons we can barely explain?

The internet has made the answers much less obvious.

When Life Chose Our People for Us

For most of human history, our everyday social circles were largely shaped by circumstances beyond our control.

Family, hometown, school, work, military service. People found themselves together because they were born in the same place, lived nearby, worked toward a common goal, or depended on one another.

That doesn't mean people couldn't choose their friends. They have always sought out others who shared their interests, formed associations, exchanged letters, and traveled to meet like-minded people. But most of us had far fewer opportunities to do so than we have today.

I remember well how relationships developed in an ordinary workplace or military unit. You might completely disagree with a fellow officer's views. His habits might irritate you, and you might argue about almost everything.

But over time, you accumulated shared experiences.

You learned how someone behaved under pressure, whether he kept his word, whether he could admit a mistake. Sometimes the person you most enjoyed talking to turned out to be unreliable. Meanwhile, a quiet, rather reserved colleague unexpectedly became a genuine friend.

Life gave you opportunities to see people from different angles.

The internet offered another route.

Today, you can find someone who shares your interests before learning their age, profession, or even their name. You no longer have to spend years in someone's company before discovering a sense of intellectual connection.

An astronomy enthusiast in a small town can discuss observations with someone in another country. An aspiring writer can receive feedback from readers they've never met. Someone fascinated by philosophy can encounter people whose paths would never have crossed theirs in everyday life.

I have no desire to underestimate what we've gained.

But an interesting question arises: if closeness once often grew out of knowing someone for a long time, it can now emerge before we've really come to know them at all.

So how well do we actually know someone we've already begun to think of as one of our own?

The Person Behind the Mask

We play roles in ordinary life, too.

At work, I'm a manager. At home, a husband and father. Among friends, I'm a different person again. The way I speak, behave, and even the subjects I enjoy discussing change with the circumstances.

I don't think one of these versions is real and the others are false. Each reveals a different part of who I am.

Online, we have far more freedom to choose our roles.

We can hide our age, profession, or social standing. We can change our name, photograph, or biography. Sometimes people do this to deceive. Sometimes they do it to feel free.

Imagine someone who rarely speaks up in public. Perhaps they're afraid of ridicule, or simply uncomfortable drawing attention to themselves. Under a pseudonym, that same person may become a witty, passionate debater who can hold an audience's attention while discussing remarkably complex questions.

Which version is the real person?

I suspect that's the wrong question. We aren't obliged to reveal every part of ourselves in every situation.

But anonymity also makes something else possible.

Someone can deliberately pretend to hold beliefs they don't actually share. They can provoke an audience, test people's reactions, or try out an unfamiliar point of view. Sometimes they play their chosen role so convincingly that others mistake it for their genuine identity.

And then something rather curious happens.

We may embrace someone as one of us because of beliefs they're only pretending to hold. Or reject someone as an outsider because of words they wrote purely to provoke a reaction.

Even a sincerely held conviction isn't necessarily permanent. Someone may lack information, make a mistake, encounter better arguments, and change their mind.

We've all revised our opinions at one time or another. Yet we sometimes treat a stranger's online comment as a definitive statement of who that person is.

A few lines on the internet are a rather flimsy basis for such certainty.

A Community of Strangers

In October 2026, the American Pew Research Center published a study of online communities. Researchers surveyed 9,750 U.S. adults to understand what people find in digital communities and how close they become to other members.

One finding caught my attention.

Among people who participated in online communities, 68% knew few or none of the other members of their main community before joining.

That's one of the possibilities the internet offers. You enter a community of strangers, where nobody knows your past, your profession, or your position in life. You're drawn by the subject being discussed, a shared interest, or the chance to ask for advice.

But do those strangers become close to one another?

Only about one in five participants felt very or extremely close to others in their main online community. Another 37% felt somewhat close. Nearly half reported little or no closeness at all.

And among those who had known few or no members before joining, only about one in ten went on to feel a strong sense of closeness to other participants.

The picture is interesting. The internet allows us to find people we might never have encountered in ordinary life. We can talk to them every day, exchange knowledge, and participate in shared activities. Yet closeness doesn't necessarily follow.

Does that mean these communities have little value? Quite the opposite.

Many respondents said their main online community gave them something they couldn't find offline.

I think this raises an interesting question about what we mean by "our people."

Someone may feel that a community is their own, gain knowledge, enjoyment, and support from it, and still have no close friends there.

Perhaps belonging and closeness are two different things. The digital world has simply made that distinction easier to see.

Has Friendship Become More Fluid?

In 2018, the journal New Media & Society published a study by two Dutch sociologists, Eva Vriens and Erik van Ingen.

They were interested in a fairly straightforward question: do social networking sites undermine our close relationships?

They examined data from 5,312 people in the Netherlands, aged 15 to 45. Participants were surveyed twice, allowing the researchers to observe changes in the circle of people with whom they discussed important personal matters.

The results challenged the idea that the internet inevitably destroys friendships.

People who used social networking sites more frequently tended to have a larger circle of such confidants. When individuals increased their social media use, the number of people in that circle also rose slightly.

But the researchers found another pattern.

Among more active users, the composition of that circle changed more often. New people appeared; others dropped out. At the same time, these users could also have more enduring connections than those who used social networking sites less frequently.

At first glance, that sounds contradictory. But a larger social circle can contain more relationships that endure and more that change.

The study doesn't establish that social media caused people to make or lose friends. Nor does a change in someone's circle of confidants necessarily mean a friendship has ended. We may simply turn to different people at different stages of our lives.

Still, the findings give us reason to question the familiar claim that digital communication inevitably displaces real friendship.

Our relationships may be becoming both more numerous and more varied.

And that brings me to something I've been thinking about.

Today I can discuss philosophy with one person, technical matters with another, and music with a third. Each may feel close to me in a particular area of my life.

But must someone share all my interests for me to consider them one of my own?

Probably not.

The digital world allows us to build different circles of connection without expecting every person in them to see the world exactly as we do.

Whether someone will be there when life gets difficult is another question altogether.

Does Disagreement Make Someone an Outsider?

I enjoy arguing.

A conversation with someone who can defend an opposing position is often more interesting than one with someone who agrees with everything I say.

A convincing counterargument forces me to examine my own conclusions. Sometimes I discover something I didn't know. Sometimes it turns out that the other person was working from mistaken assumptions.

And sometimes we both stick to our original positions.

So what?

Disagreement alone doesn't make someone an outsider.

Of course, there are moral boundaries beyond which I cannot accept certain beliefs or actions. But most everyday disagreements don't come close to those extremes.

Online, however, judgments are often made much faster.

Someone posts a comment. We read it, take offense, and promptly assign the author to one camp or another. Us or them.

Everything they say afterward is filtered through that judgment.

Yet we may have completely misunderstood what they meant. Perhaps they were being ironic, deliberately provocative, careless with their words, or simply mistaken.

The paradox is that the internet allows us to encounter vastly more people with a wider range of views, while often giving us too little information to judge any one of them fairly.

And we make up for that lack of knowledge with certainty.

Judging someone's convictions from a single comment is about as reliable as judging their character from a five-minute elevator ride.

Although in the elevator, at least you can see who pressed the wrong button.

Belonging Doesn't Mean Being Accepted

There's another aspect of digital relationships I hadn't given much thought to before.

In an ordinary social circle, belonging usually involves mutual recognition. You know the people around you, and they know you. You meet, talk, and take part in one another's lives.

Online, you can spend years feeling part of a community while remaining completely unknown to most of its members.

You read posts, follow arguments, celebrate a favorite writer's success, and recognize regular commenters by their usernames.

You feel you're among your own people.

But do they think of you as one of theirs?

That sense of belonging isn't necessarily an illusion. Someone can genuinely gain knowledge, support, and pleasure from participating, even when hardly anyone notices their presence.

But it's different from a relationship in which both people know one another and accept at least some responsibility for each other.

We can feel connected to people we've never met personally. Yet real trust probably requires something more than shared interests.

Which brings me back to my imaginary neighbors.

On the astronomy forum, they know each other far better than they do in the elevator. Or at least they think they do.

But do they know how the other behaves outside their conversations about the stars?

Perhaps that doesn't matter at all for an enjoyable intellectual exchange.

For friendship, though, it's a more interesting question.

When a Stranger Turns Out to Be One of Us

I don't believe the digital age has erased older forms of human connection.

We still value family, friends, and the people with whom we've been through difficult experiences. Shared lives and mutual support haven't lost their meaning.

But we now have another way to find kindred spirits, one that depends far less on geography, age, profession, or our usual social surroundings.

For some, it has offered a way out of loneliness. For others, it's provided companions who share unusual interests. And for others still, it has offered a chance to explore a new role and discover abilities they never knew they had.

That freedom also brings complications.

We can mistake agreement for deep personal connection. We can reject people over isolated remarks without trying to understand what they meant. We can become so accustomed to the company of like-minded people that an ordinary disagreement begins to feel like an unnecessary ordeal.

But another thought keeps coming back to me.

"Us" and "them" increasingly seem less like permanent categories of people.

The same person can be one of us in a philosophical debate, on the other side of a political argument, a stranger in everyday life, and a dependable friend when things go wrong.

None of those roles necessarily tells us the whole story.

I don't know whether the internet will make human relationships deeper. The research offers little justification for either celebration or predictions of disaster.

But one change seems clear to me: we have far more freedom to choose the people with whom we feel a sense of belonging.

And far more opportunities to get that choice wrong.

Let's return to our neighbors.

Perhaps one day Orion will post on the forum that he won't be able to join the discussion tomorrow. A pipe has burst in his apartment, and he'll have to call a plumber.

Kepler will express his sympathy, wish him luck, and send him a link to another article about exoplanets.

The next morning, they'll meet in the elevator.

One will be exhausted and irritable. The other will ask why the water was shut off in the building during the night.

And who knows? Perhaps that conversation will finally give them a chance to get to know each other.

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