In the 90s before mass internet adoption, it sure felt like it.
We had disagreements, but nothing compared to what we see today.
We had disagreements, but nothing compared to what we see today.
It is really easy to romanticize the past, back when you were younger and just didn't have the same grasp of the world. Especially if you had a decent enough life at the time.
The world has made progress since you were a teen, but there is also an atmosphere of fear that the world is starting to backslide.
A lot of people are surprised to find out that people who don't live near them don't share their values.
The context of the disagreements was largely limited to newspapers and politicians. Some assumption of professionalism, editing and journalistic integrity was included with nationwide dialogues.
The internet, Twitter, political amplification, bot amplification, media consolidation, etc have made it 1000x worse.
Before, you could disagree on a topic and go about your day. Now you are beaten over the head with every topic constantly to remind you how much you disagree with it.
A lot of people prefer the comfort of ignorance to the discomfort of that knowledge.
A lot of people prefer the comfort of ignorance to the discomfort of that knowledge and even more prefer the comfort of their self made moral high horse from which they chastise everyone they deem unfit.
This is correct. The take away is something more along the lines of: when people don't know they disagree and therefore don't define themselves in terms of disagreement and further structure their lives around disagreement, they more readily work together; disagreements aren't attacks on personal branding/identity.
Maybe. I feel like those people might be living under a rock. With all the media today it seems unlikely that an individual isn't attacked on at least one belief. I know I see constant attacks on my beliefs.
The problem is that with fast transport, we are extending many laws to the larger geographic area (state or national level), which means increasing the size of the negatively affected groups since we are not homogeneous.
Edit: why disagree?
I don't know how much the internet has caused this deterioration, but it is strongly correlated.
The Tulsa massacre.
Emmett Till
Murders have dropped every decade for the last five.
The amount of political violence pre-internet is just an order of magnitude higher than today’s. Most young people (millennials, Gen Z) are completely unaware - unless you studied this stuff - that e.g. the Senate building was bombed in 1983 by a bunch of leftists upset over the US’s involvement in Lebanon.
This is to say, I’m skeptical of the argument that the internet has made things worse. Definitely not better, maybe not worse.
The partisan lines in my extended family haven't changed for as long as I can remember, but there are fewer get-togethers and more political arguments at the dinner table when they do happen. The aunt and uncle that once were my god parents have now stopped talking to my parents; nobody's political opinions changed but differences in opinion that were once barely worth mentioning are now considered actually evil.
These are people who more or less believe the same sort of thing, but disagree about which party will best implement it. It's a difference that used to not matter very much; my cousins were raised almost identically to me and my siblings. There is no real difference in social or economic class, lifestyle, or community. Simply partisan affiliation.
This has to be fascist propaganda because we know for a fact that Jan 6 was the first time the Capitol was ever attacked.
Just over 100 years ago, political disagreements in West Virginia over unionization led to a full-scale paramilitary battle at Blair Mountain [1], with upwards of 13,000 people involved and complete with the anti-unionization side bringing in private planes as improved bombers.
That's because white people violently killed, lynched, and massacred everyone that dared to cause "trouble" prior to the Civil Rights Movement.
I disagree. We didn't have it figured out - it just did not get on many folk's radar because of the differences in network effects prior to the internet. If you were a lonely kid in a farming town who wanted to dress and act like someone from the other biological gender you were shamed or shunned or cut-off. You were the weird one in your town. And that was something that everyone - EVERYONE - else in your town, no matter how empathic or sympathetic, would agree upon.
People who were "odd" just didn't know they could expect a better world. If you were coloured you just sucked up the jokes. If you were gay you hid - or you ran away to places where the network effects were more beneficial. You just dealt with it, and left the normal people to the belief that shit was figured out.
Except for us spectrum types - from about 1997 onwards EVERYONE wanted a piece of us.
If someone wanted to, lets say, "make love with toasters", he'd be looked at weird and gotten over it in the days before the internet. Now he'll find supporting communities and guidance on how to do so...
So yeah, we didn't "have it figured out" and in many aspects, online communities do provide great benefit. But i wonder, if they still are, once all is added up.
Someone living a functional, happy, fulfilling life, while having sex with toasters as their main sexuality is a functional, happy person. There is no problem there.
Whereas someone doing this and say, neglecting other life functions, or injuring themselves, or reporting it as a compulsion they would like to stop, has now met the very base level criteria to be regarded as having a mental pathology.
But that's the bar: going through the DSM and matching symptoms doesn't make for a diagnosis if the symptoms don't cause the person unhappiness, or those who interact with them danger or harm.
Dalibaner sighted
In the past, people's resentment was mostly expressed in casual ways because a society tends to suppress crazy behaviour.
But the social media business profits from this social resentment.
This is a serious issue for society to resolve, especially given the clear evidence that many people cannot distinguish sensationalism from fact and are thus influenced by it.
Given the billions of dollars profit involved and the social media addiction problem it has to be one of the most intractable problems of our age to solve.
But solve it we must.
People are generally punished throughout their lives for being ignorant. But lack of comprehension is sometimes feigned. Some people test the tolerance of their behaviour.
The existence of propanda is at once a difficult problem and a profitable problem. There is no bright side to propaganda.
In cases where people are materially punished for their bad behaviour, they shut up and pay attention. I think it likely that future social-media business will require user accounts to have verified identities and users to accept responsibility by risking direct, personal financial loss for their behaviour.
People may call this tyranny, but in fact it's how society works despite their resentment.
In the 90s, it was just easier to remain in a comfortable bubble of ignorance of just how violently people disagreed.
Today, the reality of the discord is shoved in our faces every day.
> And if the Anglophone internet is ::gestures:: like this now maybe it’s cause it’s less of a professional-class preserve? The dividing line maybe being smartphones where “people on the internet” went from “people who specifically spend $X/mo on it as luxury” to “people with telephone service”? That’s a real possibility, that for all the “Global Village” stuff the wondrous effect of the ‘90s internet was to create a cultural space that was MORE gatekept by wealth and education.
> That’s… kind of depressing, though. “Haha you thought the world was getting better because you were eliminating elitist barriers but actually it’s cause you were making them higher, which is good because the poor and non-elite are disproportionately idiots with worthless ideas and to the extent they’re on top of things the thing they’re on top of is undermining the basis of a good society, and anyway those times were a phenomenon of a narrow early adopter base and you’ll never ever get them back unless you make the non-elite economically and politically irrelevant.”
> Depressing but very well precedented, that’s exactly the arc newsprint, radio, and TV followed before.
https://kontextmaschine.tumblr.com/post/185164859368/your-gr...
The internet makes conflicts more visible. It also attenuates them, so fewer people get killed. Physical conflict is transformed into digital conflict.
Cold War was over, Berlin Wall came down, Gulf War was over on almost the first day thanks to stealth technology. Comedy was at a high point, music was diverse and fun.
There was a lot more happy and a lot less angry in people.
It really was.
Speaking of which-- what ever happened to the guy who did the "women be shoppin'" Def Jam parody in the nutty professor? I remember he appeared on some talk shows at the time but it's as if he dropped off the face of the earth in the 2000s, 2010s and the past year.
Whoever he was, 90s comedy was surely the pinnacle by any measure I can think of.