Eric O. Jacobsen - Three Pieces of Glass: Why We Feel Lonely in a World Mediated by Screens

Where Everybody Knows Your Name

The door opens, flooding the bar with natural light. An ordinary-looking, heavyset man appears and is greeted by a chorus of voices: Norm!

Thus begins the first episode of Cheers , the TV sitcom that dominated the airwaves during the 1980s. Cheers made the top-ten list of the Nielson ratings in eight of its eleven seasons. The Norm greeting became a standard trope for the show. It fit perfectly with the theme songs chorus, You want to be where everybody knows your name.

There were many reasons for Cheers popularity, but perhaps the most compelling was this themes resonance with audiences. Viewers remained loyal because they longed for a place where they were known well enough to be greeted on arrival by name. This was true in the 80s and is even more so today. This longing, while ubiquitous, is not well understood.

What specifically do we long for when we want a place where everybody knows our name? Why do we seem to be moving further away from it each passing year? And how might we encourage the development of these kinds of real places so we dont have to settle for watching people enjoy fictional ones? The answer, surprisingly enough, has to do with three pieces of glassthe car windshield, the TV, and the smartphone. These three pieces of glass represent key choices weve made at the societal and individual levels to devalue face-to-face contact with other people for the sake of efficiency, autonomy, and entertainment. But saying this only helps us to understand the problem. The more difficult part is to figure out how to solve the problem. This book is an attempt to do just that. But before we get into that project, lets begin by digging a little deeper into that desire to be greeted by name.

When I arrive home, Im greeted by people who know my name and greet me with names that betray an even more intimate connection, such as Dad or Honey. Yet I, too, long for that Norm experience. What Cheers (the bar) offers that my home does not is a particular kind of connection that I describe as civic. Additionally, the Cheers setting is quasi-public, making it a kind of forum for developing relationships with people who are different culturally and/or socioeconomically. As society becomes increasingly polarized and fragmented, settings where one can comfortably interact with people different from oneself are increasingly important.

Cheers is also a real brick-and-mortar place (or at least the Bull and Finch Pub in Boston that its based on is) where people have to be bodily present for the proper greeting to take place. This real place is a neighborhood bar, meaning that many of its patrons live in relative proximity to one another and are likely to bump into one another outside of the bar. Cheers is in Boston, which influences the topics that are discussed (Red Sox) as well as some of the tensions that exist between patrons (class, nationality, education level, etc.).