Theories of how the nation’s social fabric has changed abound. Two decades ago, it was fashionable to argue that Americans were becoming culturally isolated—that “social capital” was in decline. But in the age of social media, that now seems more far-fetched. More recently, some have posited that contemporary reliance on technology was filtering Americans into like-minded bubbles. But subsequent studies of Facebook have revealed that users end up seeing more of what other people think that one might first assume. And that’s the problem: Too often, debates about whether people are more or less connected distract from the underlying issues.

It makes more sense to focus on how exactly things have changed. On the one hand, the members of no prior generation have been so effortlessly close to the handful of people they love most: Technologies like text messages and Skype have made it possible for people to be much more entwined in the lives of our most intimate acquaintances. At the other end of the spectrum, Americans are much more connected to people who share nothing more than a single common interest. They “friend” high school acquaintances to whom they spoke just a handful of times before graduating. They “follow” the feeds of people who root for the same football team.

Has anything been lost in the wash? As it turns out, yes. Looking at data drawn from surveys of whom Americans were eating dinner with, researchers at Harvard and Berkeley found something remarkable. The percentage of Americans spending evenings with their families is going up. The same thing is true for acquaintances who live a good distance away. But the percentage reporting evenings with their neighbors has fallen dramatically. Time and attention is being driven to the extremes.

The upshot is that Americans are no longer so devoted to the middling relationships that were long a staple of the American experience. The chatter around the cookie plate setup outside a PTA meeting once provided average Americans with the opportunity to connect with people they wouldn’t otherwise understand. The bonds formed on the sidelines of bowling tournaments provided a window into the thinking of acquaintances working the levers deep inside the institutional machines. But because they no longer bowl in leagues—because PTA meetings have been supplanted by online petitions—strangers have become alien. And that has left them with the impression that the institutions they inhabit are more sinister.

There’s no point to hoping that the wealth of new social opportunities spawned by new technology will be curtailed anytime soon. Americans are unlikely to return to the era when they hung out with their neighbors simply because it was next to impossible to keep in good touch with anyone else. The real issue is what might spur them to connect with people from different corners of society. And the key to answering that question may be found well outside the sphere of government reform or information technology.