The Science of Lost Connection
Recent research reveals the scope of this crisis. MIT's Sherry Turkle documents how digital communication has created what she calls "alone together"—physically connected but emotionally isolated (Turkle, 2017). Studies by the Pew Research Center show that despite unprecedented connectivity, rates of loneliness and social isolation have reached epidemic levels, particularly among young adults who've grown up primarily in digital environments (Anderson & Jiang, 2018).
Neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman's research demonstrates that our brains are fundamentally wired for social connection—that collaboration and empathy activate the same neural networks as physical needs like hunger and thirst (Lieberman, 2013). Yet the Harvard Study of Adult Development, tracking lives for over 80 years, shows that the quality of our relationships is the strongest predictor of life satisfaction and health outcomes (Waldinger & Schulz, 2023).
The disconnect is stark: we're biologically designed for collaborative meaning-making, but our asynchronous digital communication systems now actively discourage it.
Makiguchi's Framework: Beauty, Benefit, and Good
To understand what we've lost, we can turn to the educational philosopher Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, whose theory of value creation offers a profound lens for examining human communication. Makiguchi identified three fundamental types of value that humans create through interaction: beauty (aesthetic/emotional value), benefit (practical value), and good (moral/ethical value).
The philosophy of value creation stresses the autonomous capacities of learners. For Makiguchi, children were anything but empty vessels to be filled with the knowledge prescribed for them by adults. Children arrived in the classroom already possessing experience, knowledge and a capacity to learn."The aim of education is not to transfer knowledge; it is to guide the learning process, to equip the learner with the methods of research. It is not the piecemeal merchandizing of information; it is to enable the acquisition of the methods for learning on one's own; it is the provision of keys to unlock the vault of knowledge. Rather than encouraging students to appropriate the intellectual treasures uncovered by others, we should enable them to undertake on their own the process of discovery and invention. [1934]"
In traditional human dialogue—the kind that built civilizations—all three forms of value emerge naturally:
Beauty manifests in the emotional resonance of shared stories, the aesthetic pleasure of collaborative discovery, and the inherent satisfaction of being truly heard and understood.
Benefit comes through practical wisdom exchange, problem-solving together, and the mutual learning that emerges when different perspectives combine constructively.
Good develops through the moral growth that happens when we genuinely encounter other viewpoints, build empathy across difference, and strengthen the social bonds that create ethical communities.
The Algorithmic Destruction of Value
Modern social media platforms systematically destroy Makiguchi's three forms of value. Research by the Center for Humane Technology shows how engagement-optimization algorithms specifically reward content that triggers negative emotional responses—anger, outrage, fear—while suppressing content that builds understanding or connection (Harris, 2019).
Studies by MIT's Sinan Aral reveal that false information spreads six times faster than truth on social platforms, not because people intentionally share misinformation, but because falsehoods are designed to be more emotionally provocative than nuanced truth (Vosoughi et al., 2018). The algorithmic preference for engagement over accuracy creates an information ecosystem that rewards the most inflammatory takes while drowning out collaborative, value-creating dialogue.
The result is what researchers call "context collapse"—the flattening of complex human experiences into bite-sized, context-free content optimized for viral spread rather than genuine understanding (Boyd, 2011). We've traded the collaborative meaning-making that creates Makiguchi's three forms of value for systems that extract attention and monetize division.
The Wisdom Crisis
Anthropologist Helen Fisher's research on human pair bonding shows that deep conversation—what she calls "intricate conversation"—is one of the primary mechanisms through which humans build trust and connection (Fisher, 2016). Yet studies by the American Psychological Association demonstrate that the average person now spends less than 30 minutes per day in meaningful face-to-face conversation (APA, 2019).
Every day, profound human wisdom disappears without being captured or shared. Research by the MacArthur Foundation's How We Get To Next project shows that traditional knowledge transfer—the passing of wisdom from elders to younger generations through story and dialogue—has declined dramatically in industrialized societies (MacArthur Foundation, 2020).
A grandmother's insights about resilience, learned through decades of hardship and joy. An immigrant's story of adaptation and belonging. A founder's real journey through failure and breakthrough. These stories contain what Makiguchi would recognize as the fullest expression of human value creation—beauty in their emotional truth, benefit in their practical wisdom, and good in their capacity to build empathy and connection.
But in our current information ecosystem, this wisdom has no place. It's too personal for news, too unpolished for social media, too deep for algorithmic feeds optimized for quick engagement rather than lasting value.
Value Creation Through Voice: A Research-Based Solution
The solution lies in what MIT's Rosalind Picard calls "affective computing"—technology designed to recognize and respond to human emotional and social needs rather than simply optimizing for engagement metrics (Picard, 1997). Recent advances in AI make it possible to preserve and surface the collaborative essence of human dialogue at scale.
Research by Stanford's Center for Compassion and Altruism shows that hearing someone's actual voice—as opposed to reading their words—activates mirror neurons and empathy responses in ways that text-based communication cannot (Doty, 2016). Studies by the University of Chicago's Behavioral Science Lab demonstrate that voice-based storytelling creates stronger emotional connections and better retention of complex information than any other medium (Schroeder & Epley, 2015).
This research points toward a solution: collecting, preserving, and sharing the lived wisdom of everyday people through voice-recorded conversations that create all three of Makiguchi's forms of value.
Here are two examples:
Story Collection involves trained interviewers having rich, meaningful conversations with people about their life journeys, relationships, challenges, and transformations. These conversations create:
- Beauty through the emotional resonance of authentic human stories told in people's own voices
- Benefit through the practical wisdom and insights that emerge from lived experience
- Good through the empathy and connection that develop when we truly hear others' experiences
Voice Journaling creates a simple practice of reflection and self-discovery. People call a number, receive a thoughtful prompt, speak freely about their experience, and receive an AI-generated summary that helps them process their own thoughts and feelings over time. This creates value through:
- Beauty in the aesthetic satisfaction of self-reflection and personal growth
- Benefit through improved emotional awareness and decision-making capacity
- Good through the moral development that comes from regular self-examination
AI as Value Preservation, Not Replacement
The key innovation lies in using AI to preserve and surface Makiguchi's three forms of value rather than optimizing for engagement metrics. Advanced natural language processing can identify and highlight moments of genuine insight, emotional resonance, and collaborative meaning-making within conversations.
Instead of reducing complex human experiences to viral soundbites, AI summarization can preserve the texture of collaborative dialogue—the moments where understanding emerges through exchange, where people build on each other's ideas, where genuine learning happens through respectful disagreement.
Research by MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory shows that AI systems trained to recognize collaborative dialogue patterns can help surface the most valuable aspects of human conversation while maintaining their authentic, emotionally resonant qualities (Cao et al., 2020).
Building Social Infrastructure for Human Flourishing
Makiguchi understood that education—in its deepest sense—is about creating value through human interaction. This approach represents a new kind of educational infrastructure: a searchable, emotionally resonant library of human insight that serves all three forms of value creation.
Imagine searching for wisdom about career transitions and finding not expert advice, but the actual voices of dozens of people who've navigated similar changes—their fears, their insights, their hard-won understanding creating beauty through emotional connection, benefit through practical wisdom, and good through expanded empathy.
This isn't just a media project or a tech platform. It's social infrastructure designed around Makiguchi's insight that human value is created through the collaborative exchange of experience, wisdom, and understanding.
The Path Forward
Research across neuroscience, psychology, and sociology points to the same conclusion: humans are fundamentally collaborative meaning-making creatures. The current digital landscape has pushed us away from these collaborative instincts, but emerging technologies make it possible to restore what we've lost at unprecedented scale.
By intentionally capturing and preserving genuine human dialogue, we can begin to rebuild communication systems that create Makiguchi's three forms of value rather than destroying them. We can move beyond the engagement-optimization that has fractured human connection toward technology that genuinely serves human flourishing.
The question isn't whether technology will continue to shape human communication—it will. The question is whether we'll build systems that create beauty, benefit, and good through collaborative dialogue, or continue to drift toward platforms that extract attention while destroying the social bonds that make life meaningful.
Makiguchi believed that the purpose of education—and by extension, all human communication—is value creation (Makiguchi, 1930/2002). In an age of artificial intelligence and algorithmic feeds, this vision offers both a diagnosis of what's gone wrong and a blueprint for building something better.
The conversation starts now. The value we create together will determine not just our individual flourishing, but the kind of civilization we become.
References
American Psychological Association. (2019). Stress in America 2019: Stress and current events. APA.
Anderson, M., & Jiang, J. (2018). Teens, social media & technology 2018. Pew Research Center.
Boyd, D. (2011). Social network sites as networked publics: Affordances, dynamics, and implications. In Z. Papacharissi (Ed.), A networked self: Identity, community, and culture on social network sites (pp. 39-58). Routledge.
Cao, Y., Li, S., Liu, Y., Yan, Z., Dai, Y., Yu, P. S., & Sun, L. (2020). A comprehensive survey of AI-generated content (AIGC): A history of generative AI from GAN to ChatGPT. arXiv preprint.
Doty, J. R. (2016). Into the magic shop: A neurosurgeon's quest to discover the mysteries of the brain and the secrets of the heart. Avery.
Fisher, H. (2016). Anatomy of love: A natural history of mating, marriage, and why we stray. W. W. Norton & Company.
Harris, T. (2019). The tech industry's psychological war on kids. Center for Humane Technology.
Lieberman, M. D. (2013). Social: Why our brains are wired to connect. Crown Publishers.
MacArthur Foundation. (2020). How we get to next: Traditional knowledge systems in the digital age. MacArthur Foundation Reports.
Makiguchi, T. (2002). A geography of human life (D. M. Bethel, Trans.). Caddo Gap Press. (Original work published 1930)
Picard, R. W. (1997). Affective computing. MIT Press.
Schroeder, J., & Epley, N. (2015). The sound of intellect: Speech reveals a thoughtful mind, increasing a job candidate's appeal. Psychological Science, 26(6), 877-891.
Turkle, S. (2017). Alone together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other. Basic Books.
Vosoughi, S., Roy, D., & Aral, S. (2018). The spread of true and false news online. Science, 359(6380), 1146-1151.
Waldinger, R. J., & Schulz, M. S. (2023). The good life: Lessons from the world's longest scientific study of happiness. Simon & Schuster.
Complete Works of Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, (in Japanese) Daisan Bunmeisha, Vol 6, pg 285 (Cf. Bethel 1989, 168)
Thanks to Tee Ponsukcharoen for reading drafts and giving feedback.