This is the second in a three-part series on relevance.
In Part 1 of this series, we explored the Relevance Hierarchy, establishing three tiers of relevance and distinguishing between the “Rich Path” of deep community devotion and the “Weak Path” of algorithmic scale to Cultural Relevance. We established that the most beneficial way to reach cultural relevance is to build Social Relevance—the middle tier in our system.
But how and where exactly is that social relevance forged today?
Twenty years into the era of social networks, we understand that social connection has moved online, organizing itself into countless distinct digital communities.
The problem is that we still misunderstand the cultural gravity of these communities.
We look at a niche community—like the thousands of people who stream marble races, maintaining detailed spreadsheets of the marbles’ ‘career stats’—and we write it off as a “quirk.” We see it as too small to scale and too weird to matter. We prioritize the broad “Audience” because it looks like the mass market we grew up with.
This is a strategic error. In the algorithmic era, these hyper-specific niches have become the homes of social relevance and the incubators of cultural relevance.
To understand why, we have to look at how the architecture of community has evolved from Proximity to Affinity.
The Evolution: Expanding the Radius
The history of community is defined by the limits of our reach. For the majority of people, the evolution followed a specific path.
Phase 0: Physical Proximity
Before the internet, community was most frequently a function of geography. Your community consisted of the people within your physical radius—your school, your church, your neighborhood.
- The Dynamic: Proximity. You bonded with the people you could touch.
- The Limit: Socialization around personal interests could be limited.
Phase 1: Digitized Proximity
Technology began by digitizing this radius. For many, the cell phone contact app was the first digital social graph—a list that mirrored our offline relationships. Early social media simply moved that phone book to the web as we cataloged our friends.
- The Dynamic: Replication. We uploaded our physical village to the internet and increased the frequency with which we could connect.
- The Limit: Our communities were still constrained by who we had met in the real world.
Phase 2: Active Affinity
Then came the forums, wikis, and subreddits. We organized by passion, transcending location.
- The Dynamic: Construction. We built new towns based on shared interests.
- The Limit: Friction. You had to actively search, vet, and do the work of joining.
Phase 3: Passive Affinity
Today, the machine generates the potential for community. It notices that you and 400,000 others share a specific behavioral pattern, clusters you together, and serves you content.
The Map: Internal vs. External Definition
This evolution has created a landscape where we can categorize communities by how they are formed.
1. The Village (Human + Internal)
Your physical reality. High trust, tangible support, shared culture but unscalable.
2. The Audience (Human + External)
A group defined by a creator, broadcaster, or brand. The Audience provides the illusion of community, but it is a vertical relationship (one-to-many), not a lateral one.
3. The Cohort (Machine + External)
A group defined by an algorithm to be served by recommendation systems and feeds. Think of this as millions of people watching the same video separately.
4. The Virtual Community (Machine + Internal)
The destination. The machine creates the cluster, but the members define the culture. As with The Village, this is where shared culture—language, lore, and identity—is forged. Infinitely scalable.
Virtual Communities and Social Relevance
The greatest difference between the old physics and the new is where social relevance is created.
In the broadcast era, a massive cultural moment—a hit TV show or major movie—would first achieve Cultural Relevance through mass reach. Its slang would then trickle down to the local, physical Village, where friends would quote it to one another. That connection within the Village was Social Relevance.
Today, we forge that relevance from the ground up. This begins with an essential rule for modern connection: The active consumption and sharing of content is what sustains connections in all Virtual Communities.
In these spaces, Social Relevance is a measure of importance. The more foundational, shared, and discussed a piece of content is, the greater its social relevance to that community.
This creates a hierarchy of cultural artifacts. A random viral video might have “Thin” relevance (high views, low discussion). But the video that establishes the lore, the meme that becomes a shorthand for the group’s worldview, or the tutorial that everyone references—these possess High Social Relevance.
They become the Canon of the community.
This transformation—turning algorithmic feed into shared Canon—is the defining characteristic of the jump from Quadrant 3 (The Cohort) to Quadrant 4 (The Virtual Community). It requires human agency. It happens when viewers recognize that the machine has grouped them together and decide to wrest control of that grouping.
They name themselves. They build the lore. They take the content served to the Cohort and make it foundational to their identity.
Case Study: Resurrecting City Pop
We see this mechanism clearly in the resurrection of City Pop, a genre of Japanese pop music from the 1980s that had largely faded into obscurity.
Decades after its peak, the YouTube recommendation algorithm began surfacing a specific track—”Plastic Love” by Mariya Takeuchi—to millions of Western listeners who had never heard it before.
The machine created the Cohort (Quadrant 3) by serving the video to people with similar listening habits. But the people created the Community (Quadrant 4).
They gathered in the comments, sharing nostalgia for a time and place they had never lived in. They identified “Plastic Love” as their Canon. They built an entire aesthetic (“Future Funk”) around it. They remixed it, sampled it, and evangelized it until it influenced global superstars like The Weeknd.
A dead genre from a different continent became the basis for a vibrant, living community, simply because the algorithm found the latent affinity and the people built the culture.
The Value: Supplementing the Village
Why do people invest this energy? Why build a community around 80s Japanese pop or marble racing?
Because our lived existence is fundamentally hybrid. We rely on our physical communities for proximity, but we rely on our digital communities to validate the specific parts of our identity that our geography can’t support.
The data confirms this necessity. In the Fandom trends report I authored for my day job at YouTube, we found that “47% of Gen Z reported belonging to a fandom that no one they know personally is a part of”.
For nearly half of this generation, the “Village,” alone, cannot support their specific interests. Without the “Virtual Community,” that part of their social identity would stagnate.
Instead, the algorithm connects them, and the impact is profound. These spaces actively shape the personality of the participant. In our Next Gen Creativity trends report, 58% of 14- to 24-year-olds said their sense of humor has been shaped by the internet with similar numbers for personal style, slang, and other aspects of their personality..
The Hybrid Reality
Ultimately, the distinction between “online” and “offline” relevance is dissolving. We live in hybrid worlds.
Because more of our communing is happening in these digital spaces, Social Relevance is increasingly built through online content and conversation. It is where we find the language, the humor, and the tribes that define who we are.
But these niche obsessions don’t always stay contained. Sometimes, the energy generated within these Virtual Communities becomes too intense to stay hidden.
In our final post, we will look at what happens when things escape this layer of the hierarchy to reach Cultural Relevance, and the implications that has for the concept of the Monoculture.
