The feed is not the street

For most of history, what we knew about how people lived came from the people around us. A neighbour's wedding, a cousin's new shop, a story passed along at the market. Some of it was exaggerated, but most of it was close to life.

Now a large part of the day goes to a stream of moments chosen because they are the most of something. The most expensive birthday. The fastest-growing small brand. The cruellest landlord, the most generous stranger, the best comeback, the worst holiday ever filmed. Each one is selected from an almost unlimited supply, and only the outliers make it to the top.

Spend enough hours inside that stream and the outliers begin to feel like the average.

A young woman starting an online shop compares her first month with sellers who seem to have sold out in a week. A father wonders why his son's birthday felt small. A shop owner decides that being merely good is the same as being invisible. None of them is being foolish. They are drawing reasonable conclusions from a very unreasonable sample.

The extraordinary is extraordinary precisely because it is rare. That stays true even when it fills every screen. A feed built from a billion clips will always show something astonishing, and it would be strange if it did not. What it cannot show is how ordinary life actually goes, because ordinary life never wins the selection.

The street outside the window is still the better guide to how most people live, buy and get by.

The exceptional feels normal now. It is not.