The Common Thread

How Shared Attention Became a Lost Art

There was a time when America still tuned to the same signal. Edward R. Murrow spoke and a nation leaned closer. Walter Cronkite ended the evening with 'That's the way it is,' and for a moment, it felt true. We did not all agree, but we began from the same story.

When families gathered around the television, the room became a small republic. Dad chose the channel, but everyone watched together. Kids at school traded lines from The Fall Guy or The A-Team. Even Batman carried jokes adults could hear but children could not. It was not the content that mattered. It was the common ground beneath it.

Then the spectrum exploded. Cable arrived. At first it looked like liberation—more voices, more choice, more control. But abundance changed the economy of attention.

Ted Turner discovered that reruns were cheaper than sitcoms and that arguments were cheaper than both. Crossfire was born: two people shouting on camera while the world watched from the sidelines. Conflict, it turned out, was good for business.

Soon, every channel learned the math. Anger kept viewers from turning away. Certainty made them loyal. And the public square, once a shared signal, fractured into frequency wars.

When audiences scattered, advertisers followed. The further from the center a group drifted, the easier it became to sell to them. Niche markets meant predictable habits, measurable passions, reliable triggers. The story no longer had to unite; it only had to convert.

My cousin Joseph C. Phillips—actor, author, and member of the Republican National Committee's African American Advisory Board—once told me why he was never invited onto those Sunday panels. 'I think for myself,' he said, 'and they want combatants, not thinkers. Consensus kills ratings.'

The networks did not create division. They learned to monetize it.

Then the internet arrived, carrying those same incentives into every pocket on earth.

What began as competition for viewers became competition for outrage. Every headline, every segment, every algorithmic suggestion started asking the same quiet question: What will keep them watching?

Most of us live near the middle—not by indecision but by temperament. We listen before we speak. We can hold two ideas at once without needing to destroy either. But the middle does not shout, and silence does not trend.

When engagement replaced accuracy as the measure of success, moderation disappeared from the feed. Outrage became oxygen. Algorithms learned that people who are furious stay online longer than people who are thoughtful. The quiet majority was still there, but drowned in the applause for extremes.

We started mistaking noise for participation. Volume for truth. Reach for relevance.

Shared attention once gave us a civic rhythm. We could argue about the same facts and return to the table afterward. Now, each of us lives inside a personalized echo—custom realities built to match what we already believe.

It is comfortable. And it is deadly.

When everyone hears a different world, empathy becomes impossible. You cannot understand what you cannot hear.

A culture that prizes individuality must still find ways to harmonize. Otherwise freedom turns into static.

Attention, like development, is a design problem. We get the behavior the architecture rewards.

If we hope to tune the room again, we have to rebuild the acoustics of attention. That begins with design—classrooms, platforms, and living rooms shaped to reward curiosity over certainty. Places where disagreement bends rather than breaks.

A society does not collapse because it argues. It collapses because it stops listening.

Flat walls echo. Curved walls listen. And if we can still hear that difference, there is hope for the thread that holds us together.