Pennsylvania: Sometimes, the best way to get off your phone is not to put it down, but to go somewhere people already know your name.
For a paediatrician, health communicator and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, that realisation came at a dog park, with a leash wrapped around their ankles.
Harford Park in Wayne, Pennsylvania, is a 30-acre space of grass and mature trees where dogs have been allowed to roam off-leash since 1997. The same 15 or 20 people tend to show up most afternoons.
There are running jokes, familiar faces, gossip, complaints and dogs greeting one another. People argue about politics, talk about difficult years and tease each other about everything from weight to bad hips.
It might sound ordinary. That is precisely the point.
The everyday places that bring us together
The park does something that social media often struggles to replicate: it brings together people who may have very little in common beyond being in the same place at the same time.
Sociologist Ray Oldenburg called these settings ‘third places’ — spaces outside home and work where people regularly gather for informal social interaction. He pointed to neighbourhood pubs, main streets, general stores and other everyday places where chance encounters could happen.
Today, some of those spaces have disappeared or become less central to daily life. At the same time, social media has made it easier to build communities around shared interests, identities and opinions.
That convenience can come with a cost.
When algorithms choose the community
Social platforms can sort people according to their interests, beliefs and grievances, making it easier to spend time with people who already think in similar ways.
Online, encountering an opposing opinion does not necessarily mean encountering the person behind it.
A dog park works differently.
The person standing beside you may disagree with you about politics but know your dog’s name. They may have a different income, age, religion or set of beliefs, but you still see them every week.
Why chance encounters matter
Research suggests that repeated, low-stakes contact between people from different groups can reduce prejudice.
A meta-analysis of 515 studies by Thomas Pettigrew and Linda Tropp found that contact can work by reducing anxiety while increasing empathy and perspective.
In other words, familiarity can make a difference.
That may help explain why simply showing people opposing views online does not always make them more understanding. Research by sociologist Christopher Bail and colleagues found that exposure to political content from the opposing side on Twitter could actually reinforce existing political positions among some users.
An argument on a screen is not the same as knowing a person.
From opinions to people
At the dog park, political disagreements become just one part of a relationship.
The person you disagree with about nearly everything may also be the person whose dog has a bad hip, who makes you laugh or who has been having a difficult year.
That shift — from seeing someone as an opinion to seeing them as a person — can be difficult to create online.
Making room for real-world connections
The solution may not require giving up social media altogether.
It could mean making room for the kinds of places that bring us into contact with people we did not choose based on an algorithm: a local sports group, a community class, a neighbourhood café, a knitting club or simply the same park every afternoon.
These places do not need to be perfect. They only need to give people a reason to keep showing up.
Because sometimes community is not about finding people who agree with us. It is about finding places where we keep meeting people who do not.