HIGHER GROUND: When every citizen receives a different front page, we should not be surprised that we begin to see different worlds
By Kyle Ogden
There are moments when an idea lands with such clarity that it changes the way you see the world.
For me, one of those moments came recently while listening to CNN commentator Van Jones speak in Dallas. Near the end of his remarks, he held up his phone and said plainly: “This is not your friend.”
Then he described a sound many Americans once heard each morning: the newspaper hitting the front porch. THWACK. THWACK. THWACK.
That sound represented more than newsprint. It represented a shared civic experience.
For generations, Americans did not all agree, but many of us at least began the day with common reference points. We read the local newspaper. We watched trusted voices on the evening news—Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and others—speaking to a broad national audience. They were not perfect. Newspapers were not perfect. Television news was never free from bias or human judgment. But the experience was more shared than segmented.
Neighbors could argue passionately about what the news meant, but often they had seen the same headlines, heard the same lead stories and inhabited something closer to the same factual neighborhood. There was a civic “we” embedded in the act of consuming news.
That world is gone.
Today there is no single front porch and no shared thwack of the morning paper. Instead, there is a glowing screen delivering each of us a different front page—filtered through algorithms engineered to capture attention, media ecosystems built for ideological loyalty and social feeds that quietly learn which fears, grievances or suspicions will keep us engaged the longest.
In this environment, even the word “facts” begins to feel unstable. One person’s understanding of reality comes from a left-leaning outlet convinced it is defending democracy. Another’s comes from a right-leaning source convinced it is defending America. Still another’s comes from a personalized stream of videos, headlines and posts designed less to inform than to provoke emotion.
The result is not merely that we interpret the same world differently. Increasingly, we are not being shown the same world at all.
That realization should humble us.
If each of us is living inside a personalized and emotionally charged information environment, then perhaps we should not be surprised that people we once respected now seem to inhabit another planet. In a sense, they do. And so do we.
This is not simply a media problem. It is a civic and human problem.
When communities lose shared sources of information, they lose some of the common ground required for trust. When citizens are conditioned daily to view one another as threats, fools or enemies, empathy begins to erode. When our private feeds continually reinforce our private suspicions, we become less curious about the actual human beings standing in front of us.
At Thanks-Giving Square, we think often about how to bridge the widening chasms in our culture.
As a shared sacred space in the heart of downtown Dallas, the Square exists to bring people together across beliefs, backgrounds and ideologies—to help people move through difference in search of common ground and, ultimately, higher ground.
One expression of this is our Good City Storytelling Spirals, where strangers gather for conversations that increasingly feel rare in modern American life. A Muslim homemaker shares her story while a Christian pastor listens alongside a Jewish community leader. A business executive leans in while a student speaks honestly about loneliness, hope or fear. A civic leader reflects on the burden of public life while a social services provider describes the suffering she witnesses every day.
And slowly, something changes.
The labels soften. The assumptions soften. The caricatures soften.
What emerges is something older and more enduring than ideology: relationship.
That is why I increasingly believe one of the greatest challenges facing American cities is not merely political polarization, but relational erosion. We have built technologies capable of connecting us globally while often weakening the local human relationships that help communities flourish. We know more about strangers online than we do about the people living across the street. We are saturated with information and yet starving for understanding.
Van Jones was right. The phone in our hand is not always our friend.
Not because technology itself is inherently evil. Not because every journalist, commentator or platform operates in bad faith. And not because we can—or should—return to some imagined golden age of media.
The deeper issue is this: our tools shape our attention, our attention shapes our perception and our perception shapes how we treat one another.
Algorithms do not possess wisdom, mercy, gratitude or concern for the common good. Their purpose is engagement. And outrage engages. Fear engages. Division engages.
But flourishing communities are built differently.
They are built through conversation, listening and shared experiences that remind people they belong not merely to ideological tribes, but to one another. They are built when we recover the humility to admit, “I may not be seeing the whole picture.”
This does not mean abandoning truth. It means becoming more serious about how truth is pursued. It means supporting credible journalism, becoming more disciplined stewards of our own information habits and recognizing when a source is not informing us, but inflaming us. It means seeking real human encounters that no algorithm can personalize, manipulate or monetize.
Dallas needs those encounters. Every city does.
At a time when many people feel exhausted by division and fragmentation, places that create space for reflection, understanding and shared humanity become essential civic infrastructure. We need parks, plazas, schools, houses of worship, cultural institutions and public spaces where people can practice the habits that sustain a healthy democracy: respect, civility, curiosity, kindness and gratitude.
No algorithm—however sophisticated—can replace the experience of two human beings sitting together, listening to one another’s stories and remembering, however briefly, that they belong to the same community after all.
Perhaps that is how we begin restoring the civic fabric so many people long for today.
One conversation. One shared experience. One human connection at a time.
Kyle Ogden is President & CEO of Thanks-Giving Square Foundation