I grew up at a time when daily television dramas were at their most popular. They completely dominated national broadcast networks from 11:30 AM to 4 PM. The three major networks competed against each other for viewers with shows like The Guiding Light, All My Children, Santa Barbara, and Edge of Night among them.

Before the common household use of Video Cassette Recorders, soap operas were dependent on the segment of the population that was home in the early afternoons. People who did shift work, stay at home parents or people who simply did not work. Broadcast networks were solely supported by advertising dollars so there was no charge to watch. All one had to do was simply turn on the TV. The viewers were the commodity. The more people who watched the more the networks could charge to run commercials. It was a symbiotic three way relationship. The viewers watched the networks that were paid to advertise to the viewers who watched.

For 5 days a week 52 weeks a year, a soap operas told the story of the lives of “common everyday people.” People with a very strong flair for the dramatic, but regular people nonetheless with common everyday problems like addiction, adultery, hidden pasts, and loads and loads of secrets. Missing were the daily gems of traffic jams and broken zippers. But mostly, something about each character in each story line made them relatable. How they reacted to events in their lives and how those events shaped their future. The long story arcs felt more like life and less like entertainment than a 2 hour movie or a prime time weekly tv show.

We could get to really know the characters. Everyday we could watch as they moved through their overly dramatic lives and either root for them or wish them ill. They became our friends, or our enemies, for the hour they were given to enter our homes through our television screens. We may or may not know much about our real world neighbors, but we sure could learn who was sleeping with who in our favorite daytime dramas.

Before the mass availability of VCRs, everyone learned about their favorite characters at the same time. If you weren’t home to see it, you missed it. But once home recordings became commonplace, soap operas only increased in popularity. Soap operas reserved the summer months, the time of year when school weren’t in session, to run the most dramatic story lines that would appeal to a high school aged audience.The infamous story of Luke and Laura on General Hospital was a summer story line. Recording a show only made it more possible to invest in the lives of characters and continue on with real life.

We would tune in everyday, in some way or another, to feel a connection to lives both like and unlike our own. Our sense of humanity beyond our small communities was born from seeing strangers behave in ways we understood because we were given the opportunity to watch, and track, their growth as people.

That also explains the popularity of social media. SM takes us outside our lives and provides a pathway into others. We get to go places we never even dreamed of going, much less witnessing it in real time. We experience the trials and tribulations of our “neighbors” who live halfway across the world. We may not have known them as long as we knew our friends on the soap operas, but the are still familiar to us. We can feel like we know them.

SM gives us the same sort of connection free tv did. And once you have a device and access to wifi, you can keep track of all the new people in your life without spending extra money. A cheap phone and a Starbucks parking lot is all that’s needed to stay in touch.

But, unlike with scripted dramas that we all knew were made up, we aren’t sure about the representations on SM. Is the video being shown a slice of real life, or the end product of someones creative process. What are we actually connecting to? And if its not what we think it is, then are we truly connected?

Soap operas gave us the protection of honesty. We knew Erica Kane didn’t really exist, even when we saw Susan Lucci appear in different venues. But we all knew people like Erica Kane. A blue check only provides proof that someone is who they say they are, but it says nothing about the truth of their lives. The posts on SM are vetted and revetted until they are homogenized to illicit the greatest number of views. The filtering process strips the product of its actuality. Our connection is no longer to each other through the means of story telling. Our connection it to the screen that carries the chatter.