Creator Pulse – Keeping Connected

We didn’t lose connection. But streaming changed how we find it

Contributing Author: Mohale Moloi

Growing up, I would come home from school, watch an episode of Dragon Ball Z with my cousins, and if we were lucky, catch Mnet Open Time, which meant dinner. By the time Generations reached its first ad break, I was usually fast asleep. None of this really involved much decision-making. The viewing schedule was decided for us, and being in the room together was just what happened while the television did its work.

That way of viewing changed somewhere between boarding school and university, when I went from laptop viewing in my dorm to connecting a television to a streaming device. These days not much has changed with YouTube and Netflix setting the agenda entirely. Dinner now means watching a vlogger or scrolling through a podcast feed, and more often than not, hunting for something to watch while the food goes cold. Even when we are gathered in the same room, we increasingly spring for our own version of the experience through the smaller screen in our pocket while the larger one in front of us works in the background.

Personalisation of Viewing

This is not really a shift from togetherness to isolation but rather a move away from lean-back viewing to lean-in consumption. Appointment-era television was lean-back by nature: passive, scheduled, communal, mostly because there was little else to distract us. What has replaced it is active and personalised, with each of us remixing, skipping, and reordering our own experience rather than only receiving what a broadcaster puts in front of us.

A decade ago, 92% of South African adults watched TV at least once a week; today that number sits at 71%.

A decline so dramatic that researchers note people increasingly cannot even recall whether they watched something live on a TV or streamed it later on a tablet. The categories themselves are dissolving.

Algorithmic Isolation?

This is where I think the easy version of the isolation story gets it wrong. Being in the same room as someone doesn’t automatically mean you’re connecting with them.  A 2025 Psychology & Marketing study found something unexpected: scrolling on your phone while the TV is on in the background can make you feel more connected to others when you’re the only person in the room. But we feel less connected when we do the same thing while others are with us.

This makes sense because genuine connection is happening in formats we mostly consume individually: podcasts and vlogs. Co.Founders with the Makhs, hosted by Lerato and Phetola Makhetha, a Johannesburg-based couple raising three daughters, built their show around the conversations they felt we needed more of.

On most episodes, they invite other couples to talk plainly about the difficult parts of long-term relationships – surrendering to one another, the financial aspects of shared homeownership, raising a child with special needs, the unglamorous work of getting through a hard season.

Tellingly, they also stepped back from vlogging for a period, explaining that the format had started creating detachment from the very people and experiences it was meant to capture, alongside the relentless pressure to film, edit, and upload. It is a rare admission from inside the creator economy: that documenting a life can come at the cost of living it.

The Era of You Tube

This shared learning through solo viewing extends into other areas of our lives. A growing share of us are navigating big decisions through YouTube, watched alone on the phone or in the lounge. Car reviewers like MrHowMuch and Reba S Cars have built followings, walking viewers through the decisions that once needed a knowledgeable family member, or sacrificing a Saturday at a dealership. They touch on the real cost of ownership, fuel consumption and which features are genuinely useful versus marketing gloss. 

Even in the world of fitness or health, creators are sharing their workouts, diets and routines online, giving us ideas on how to adjust our lifestyles to become healthier. I won’t claim that the comments section on YouTube replicates the shared living room; it can’t. What it builds instead is something a living room rarely does: a specific community of people working through the same decision at the same time. Comment sections on different platforms are becoming their own kind of conversation, and a real sense of belonging is built one upload at a time.

What We pay for Personalisation

The complication is that the same personalisation enabling this sense of belonging also narrows what we see. A 2025 review of a decade’s worth of research found something genuinely complicated. Yes, algorithms do push us toward people who already think as we do, so we end up seeing fewer different opinions. But the same review found these online bubbles do something else too: they give people a real sense of belonging. So we are not simply more connected or more isolated. We are differently exposed, yes, sometimes to fewer worldviews, but often to far more of the actual texture of other people’s lives.

I think about this often after spending too much time online. Am I exposing myself to enough diverse views and experiences to keep myself aware of the world I live in? Or do I like spending time in certain spaces because they confirm the world I want to see?

The conclusion I’ve come to is this: the same micro-moments that once stayed behind closed doors, or in a WhatsApp group, now belong to a podcast episode or a stranger’s vlog. Things we often think we’re going through alone are reflected publicly in ways that validate our experiences and sometimes even challenge our beliefs. The shape of connection has changed, not necessarily its depth. Whether that trade is one we’re making consciously is the only question worth asking.

Mohale Moloi is an independent media industry analyst.