Collective Experiences

Theory #8 | On the value of creating shared context in the age of personalized, on-demand media

I started watching The Last of Us this week after my friends raved about it. The characters, the pandemic theme, how the show mirrors the video game or doesn’t. I’d never heard of it before, but the allure of shared context got me. I wanted to understand my friends’ references, all the memes, and to judge it for myself.

Humans are wired to connect with others and shared context is the foundation. How do we find shared context? Shared experiences, or the often more impactful collective experiences. But in a mostly digital, remote world, collective experiences feel ever rare. The IRL ones (e.g. going to a live concert) even feel nostalgic now.

Instead, digital media has become core to the modern collective experience. We binge tv shows the weekend they premiere, watch live streams from our favorite creators, share TikTok videos, and scroll through friends’ social posts. Then we talk about it with each other. Digital media is our main source of shared context.

And as technology increasingly offers on-demand, personalized experiences, things that we experience together become even more valuable. So what are collective experiences and what makes them so valuable? How do consumer products create modern collective experiences? And why does this matter now?

What is a collective experience?

The term “collective experience” is used too liberally. Here’s how I define it:

An event that’s consciously experienced by many people at the same time.

I think of an experience as an event — it has a beginning and an end. If it’s more constant, it might actually be a circumstance or an environment. Events make up a person’s life or the history of a community, country, or time. And some leave an impression on you, because they’re new, novel, or just move you for some reason.

And what makes an experience collective?¹ A group of people experience the same thing at the same time, and they know it. The strongest collective experiences involve intense emotion or social interaction. They often happen IRL in private or close-knit groups. Or they happen on a big scale such that they become common lived experiences. It’s harder to build collective experiences remotely, yet still possible!

What makes collective experiences so valuable?

Collective experiences give us valuable shared context — knowledge and experiences that we have in common — and hence help us to relate to each other. And in doing so, they foster social connection, community, and culture.

The social value of shared experiences

Science shows that experiences we share with others can in fact be more valuable. According to a Psychological Science study, people rate experiences as more intense when they’re shared, even with strangers. So positive experiences can feel more positive and negative ones more negative. The idea is that knowingly sharing an experience with someone, even if silently, makes us more attentive to it.

Other studies show that having common, ordinary experiences is socially far more valuable than having unique, extraordinary ones. This is because unique experiences are less useful for relating to others and fitting in. If you don’t have the “common” experiences that your peers do, you might feel on the outs.

The social network effect of shared context

Social connection isn’t just about speaking the same language. It’s often about shared context — from going to the same schools, watching the same shows and movies, understanding the same memes, etc. Collective experiences give us shared context in spades. The more people with the shared context, the more valuable it is to everyone else who has it. And the more people that have shared context that you don’t, the more you want it too (i.e. sophisticated FOMO).

This “network effect of shared context” is strongest with carriers of culture. In the digital native era, that’s often social & media-based products and experiences. Eugene Wei’s famed post Status as a Service evaluated social networks on three dimensions: utility, entertainment, and status. I see a strong fourth value proposition in all kinds of social networks — shared context. Products and experiences that create collective experiences offer shared context as a service.

How do products create collective experiences?

As very online people, we’re glued to content, apps, and the like. Sometimes we create or participate in things, but many times we just consume. We experience a lot of this as individuals, but some products give us a sense of collective experience.² They usually result from either deep shared experiences in a small group, or more shallow shared experiences in a large group.

They do it in 1 of 5 ways (and often a combination of them as products mature):

#1 They make collective action a core feature

This applies most to interactive, synchronous (or near synchronous) social and media products. It’s especially true of products that use core product constraints to emphasize collective action (e.g. everyone logs on or posts at the same time).

📸 BeReal

BeReal, the most recent photo-sharing app to reach scale, is what I’ve called a ritual social app. It’s also a rare new product that creates a collective experience, and one that’s active, not passive — everyday at the same time, everyone on the network is notified to post. If you’re in a crowd, you might even notice other people reacting to getting the notification, making it all the more unifying.

📸 HQ Trivia

HQ Trivia is one of my favorite examples of a modern collective experience. Everyone participates in the same trivia game once a day, at the same time. It’s also a ritual product that blends social, gaming, and media (and early on succeeded in capturing the zeitgeist with over 2M live users at its peak).

#2 They limit the size of the collective group

Limiting the size of the collective can be a temporary or permanent feature. It’s common in early days of any product (e.g. closed betas for a new social app). In some ways, TestFlight is the ultimate platform for creating collective experiences. Features that limit group size (e.g. separating user cohorts) can also help launched or mature products maintain a participatory, community ethos at scale.

🎙️ Clubhouse

As a synchronous social network, Clubhouse is better suited to create collective experiences. The early gated community also heightened the participatory nature of the product and hence made it feel much more collective. Early power users recall memorable experiences that happened in Clubhouse rooms capped at 5K.

🎮 Fall Guys

Video games are a form of participatory, often immersive media. Even largely single-player games can simulate collective experience by making players feel connected. The cohort mechanic (i.e. “battle royale” with 60 players) defines the collective. Fall Guys also has new seasons every few months and come with new themes, features, and game modes. So instead of it feeling like one ‘forever’ game played alone, it feels like we’re co-experiencing a series of gaming events.

#3 They turn content into rare, collective events

Streaming media is largely a passive, solo, on-demand consumption experience. But content, though inherently anti-social, can become collective when enveloped in a rare event — either with intrinsic significance or good external timing.

⚽️ FIFA World Cup

Global sporting events such as the world cup and the olympics deliver shared experience on a massive scale. IRL events with this mass appeal, even streamed online, serve a need that always on, personalized experiences simply can’t. That they happen rarely, once in 4 years, and in the span of a few weeks intensifies the experience. More than half the world’s population watched the 2022 World Cup!

📺 White Lotus

Instead of being entirely on-demand, a blended approach — with scheduled releases, weekly episode drops, and fanfare leading to a big series finale — helps synchronize audience experience and social conversation (a.k.a. a modern version of “appointment-time viewing”). HBO has cleverly adapted to the streaming era by producing high-quality “event shows" (now with the The Last of Us).