Can we have community online?

On umwelt, mitwelt and other obscure philosophical terms that might help answer that question

Way, way back in the late 90s, I was working on my qualifying exams for my Ph.D. in sociology. Qualifying exams are the last step in the Ph.D. process before you launch into dissertation research and writing. At IU, qualifying exams, or quals for short, zeroed in on the topic or sub-discipline you’d be doing your dissertation in. You assemble a very long bibliography—I think mine was 10 pages. You read all that material. Then you write some essays on the topic, given to you by your quals committee. You do this over the course of a weekend, like a very long take-home exam. Finally, you sit in a room and that committee asks you questions about your bibliography and your essays for a couple hours. The expectation is that you be intimately acquainted with every single article and book on your list.

I was lucky in that my adviser was a very gentle man who was committed to seeing my clueless self through the field of potential landmines that is getting a Ph.D. in the social sciences. Which is to say, it turned out fine.

The topic for my qualifying exams was something like community and urban sociology. I was interested in place (I still am) and this was, at the time, the main subject area to come at questions of place in sociology.¹ I was getting ready for a dissertation on the effects of suburbanization on community in the small town where I grew up.

One of the questions that was central to that literature at the time was whether or not people could feel a sense of belonging from their online interactions. Could people achieve what the sociologists called liberated community, community freed from the confines of the physical world? Maybe this seems like a naïve question in 2023. At the time I was firmly on the nay side. No, of course people could not form real community online. We need to be in each other’s physical space to form true community.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately with the things that have been going on here on Substack. The slow creep of white supremacists and transphobic people on the platform. The weirdness of Notes, which is increasingly full of people telling me how to Substack better (which almost always seems to mean getting more subscribers and making more money). One of the things people say about Substack over and over again is that it’s a community. Such a great community. They love the community here.

But, is it a community? And if it is, what kind of community is it? Can you create community in a solely online space? And is it ever the same as being neighbors or co-workers or just the regulars who show up in a local coffee shop or bar?

If Substack is a community, it’s one where the people walk around with big checkmarks hovering over their heads. That is, their status is marked for everyone to see. Would that happen in an offline community? Well, yeah, it sort of does already. Americans pretend that social class doesn’t matter, but when you ask them to judge the social class of a person based on a photo, oh, boy howdy, will they tell you who is white trash and who is a stuck-up snob. Whether we like it or not, we walk around with a lot of our statuses hanging out. Men versus women. White versus BIPOC. Temporarily able-bodied people versus people with disabilities. We accept those hierarchies in our everyday lives so it’s not unthinkable to ask us to accept them in an online community. They aren’t fair in real life and they aren’t fair on Substack, either.

One of the things I’ve always felt is different about online versus offline communities is the level of commitment. You certainly can ghost people in offline interactions, but it feels a little ickier than it does online. I remember back in the blogging days, someone writing a post about an online friend who had disappeared. They stopped blogging and stopped appearing on whatever forum they were part of. There was no way to “check up” on that friend. They didn’t know where they lived. Didn’t have their phone number. Couldn’t ask mutual friends if everything was okay.

On Substack, the level of commitment might be a little higher. I would feel bad about unsubscribing from some newsletters, especially with people who I’ve done cross-posts with or who regularly comment or restack my own posts. Still, it wouldn’t be the same as, say, switching hair stylists in my small town, which makes me break out in a cold sweat just thinking about the consequences for my social life.

I think part of what people are talking about when they talk about community on Substack is that the format of newsletters feels more intimate and complex than Tweets or Instagram posts. I mean, maybe you can know someone very well in 280 character bursts, but it feels easier to grow intimacy in the kind of long-form, deeply personal posts that are pretty standard on Substack. I feel like I really know the people as I read about their families and their jobs and all their deepest thoughts. But do I? Do the people I subscribe to on Substack really escape their two-dimensional origins on my phone or computer screen?

Phenomenological philosopher Aflred Schutz described his concepts of umwelt and mitwelt long before anything like the internet or Substack existed, but I often find myself thinking about how these ideas apply. For Schutz, umwelt is the realm of directly experienced social reality. These are the interactions that make up our “we” relations. They were, for Schutz, a product of face-to-face interactions.

Alfred Schutz, looking philosophical

Mitwelt, on the other hand, is the realm of indirectly experience social reality. This is what Schutz called “the world of contemporaries.” We experience people in the mitwelt as types rather than as complex, fully developed individual actors. In the mitwelt, people are “that famous actor” or “that NFL quarterback” rather than being my friend, my partner, or my neighbor.

In other words, in the umwelt, we see people as fully human and like us. In the mitwelt, we see people as two-dimensional representations of something. People in the mitwelt are ‘them’ and not ‘us.’ I would argue that in order to have true community, your social interactions have to be primarily in the realm of umwelt, rather than mitwelt.

So is Substack umwelt or mitwelt? Do we see people as fully human or as representations of a type? Do we see people as different types of checkmarks or as their subscriber count? Does the platform encourage us to see people that way?

Obviously, when we’re in the mitwelt realm of social interaction, we treat people differently. Because we see them as types instead of human beings, we’re less careful with what we say or do with them. I’ll say things about celebrities or athletes or other people in my world of contemporaries that I would never say about my friends or neighbors. I think mitwelt also explains the tone of a lot of online communication—the trolls and the very ugly comments people make to each other.

In the realm of mitwelt, it’s hard to give people the benefit of the doubt. I’m probably guilty of this myself. I certainly find myself thinking when I read online responses sometimes, “If they really knew me, they wouldn’t have said that.” It’s like when your friend tells you that you stepped out of line. Yes, you’re irritated, but you assume they have your best interests in mind. It’s hard to do that in mitwelt. Hell, it’s hard to do it in umwelt. Sometimes you just want to tell your friend to shut up, already.

There’s lots of other stuff that should be part of any conversation about whether Substack is really a community or not. You can’t ignore that it is, in the end, a platform whose main goal is to make money. Can that also become a community? Substack is not a community that is available to everyone. To write a newsletter, you have to have access to a computer and the internet at the very least. No, not everyone has that.

You also have to have the time it takes to write posts, which is substantial. You have to have the ability to use the technology that’s designed for able-bodied, neurotypical people. It helps to have some space where you can shut everyone else out—a room of your own. And then, beyond Substack’s problem with Nazis, it’s also a very white, straight, cisgender, ableist, and classist space. Not because Substack is special that way. Unless they’re making a very conscious, concerted effort, almost every space in 21^st century life is all of those things.

For me personally, Substack is community-ish. I’ve encountered lovely people there. Many of the newsletters describe experiences that make me feel less alone, which is one of the amazing things about writing. It’s not life-changing, though, and I suspect never will be for me. Sometimes when I get too absorbed in Notes (which is the most mitwelt part of the platform), I whisper to myself, “None of this is real.” I close my computer and step away. I walk down to my coffee shop or the library.

There are many advantages to the ideas of a liberated community, especially for those who find themselves isolated by their identities. For LGBTQ+ people, finding community on the internet when there are no other queer people in their physical spaces is an incredible gift.

Still, I wonder when we liberate community from its physical component, what do we gain and what do we lose? More than that, why do we seem to keep trying to build community online when it fails in one version or another, instead of working on the community that’s already there, outside our door? I suspect it’s precisely because the umwelt is messy and complicated in ways that mitwelt is not.

I don’t really know. What I do know is that I’m shutting down my computer and walking to the coffee shop, where most of the people don’t even know what Substack is.

1. If I’d done my dissertation ten years later, I might have focused on environmental sociology instead, but at the time, most of the people at IU had no idea what that even was.