Dr. Jones is a grassroot urban planner, architectural designer, and public policy advocate. She was recently a public voice fellow through The OpEd Project.
Despite the breathtaking beauty of our world, many young people remain oblivious to it, ensnared by the all-consuming grip of social media. A recent Yale Medicine report revealed the rising negative impact social media has on teens, as this digital entrapment rewires their brains and leads to alarming mental and physical health struggles. Tragically, they are deprived of authentic life experiences, having grown up in a reality where speculation overshadows genuine interactions.
For the sake of our society’s future, we must urgently curb social media’s dominance and promote real-world exploration through urban planning that ensures accessible, enriching environments for all economic levels to safeguard the mental and physical health of the young.
Social media’s virtual world is a dangerous place. Just as discriminatory policies can shape city planning, social media has crafted densely populated online environments that become breeding grounds for social chaos and disarray.
These virtual communities frequently carry the burden of social distress, reinforcing stereotypical problems closely associated with poverty, misbehavior and propaganda. Our responsibility lies in leveraging the potential of social media while preserving the values of genuine human connection and a harmonious living environment.
Europe’s innovative approaches in tackling the impact of social media on well-being could offer valuable insights for the United States. By drawing from Europe’s playbook, the U.S. has an opportunity to safeguard society against self-harm stemming from online platforms and to proactively foster the creation of communities through city planning design and programs that promote mental health. This is especially crucial in light of the deteriorating mental health trends observed among Americans.
In her seminal work, “ The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” prolific and influential urban planner Jane Jacobs articulated that urban planning had neglected and oversimplified the intricate nature of human lives within diverse communities. Similarly, social media, initially designed to enhance information accessibility, has evolved into a dual-edged tool. It facilitates the spread of misinformation while also contributing to mental and physical well-being issues, exemplifying the complexity of its impact on society. The rapid flow of information facilitated by social media has led to a decline in individuals’ capacity to focus and concentrate, encouraging quick, surface-level responses to situations that can significantly impact their personal well-being and livelihoods.
As inherently social beings, we possess an intrinsic requirement for human interaction and a certain degree of problem-solving that drives our continual advancement. The convenience of easily accessible social information has led to a sense of complacency that not only impacts our emotional state but also profoundly reshapes the neural pathways within the cerebral cortex of our brains. In various cases, something as seemingly innocuous as regularly consuming content on platforms like TikTok and Instagram has been scientifically demonstrated to disrupt our capacity to actively engage both socially and intellectually.
Furthermore, the introduction of artificial intelligences has intensified individuals’ willingness to rely on pre-established sources, thereby potentially diminishing their inclination for independent thought. This development prompts contemplation on the relationship between historical elite party discouragement of free thinking and the current trend of individuals overlooking creative and critical thinking beyond what major tech platforms promote.
Similar to the way community design addresses certain aspects of citizens’ fundamental needs, social media also offers attributes that cater to these needs. However, both social media and city planning can sometimes introduce benefits that inadvertently lead to detrimental effects. For instance, they can inadvertently contribute to widespread gentrification through practices resembling colonization such as constructing highways that disrupt entire neighborhoods. This process undermines the sustainability of communities, subsequently positioning social media as a distraction for citizens, exacerbating the ongoing erosion of societal foundations.
Effective urban planning for communities necessitates a comprehensive investment in various dimensions, including mental, physical, economic and structural aspects of the living environment. While social media has its role, it shouldn’t replace or overshadow in-person communal interactions on both professional and personal fronts. It’s crucial to reassess the way social media is consumed so that it serves as a tool for enriching thought rather than shaping it entirely.
By prioritizing community design, there’s an opportunity to create environments where social media coexists with interactive and sustainable communities. This approach can facilitate holistic experiences that integrate online platforms with physical spaces. It’s incumbent upon us to prevent social media from oversimplifying society and fostering a detachment from the real world and the people within it.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.