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Comment by newZWhoDis | Hacker News Reader

The talk on IRC in the 90’s was “imagine a war going on with the internet and civilians on both sides could talk to each other, why would anyone fight?”

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I think the problem with this vision isn't that "people talking to each other won't prevent violence" it's that people posting text, images, and video is not the same as people talking to each other. Even a video call is not the same as talking to someone in person. It's hard to build empathy and connection with someone you can't make eye contact with.

I think that the medium of communication is not the main problem with this idea. I say that as someone who has had & still has strong relationships formed and maintained almost entirely through text. This has been going on for centuries, with pen pals and written correspondence in general. People vary and I think not everyone has the same need for physical proximity and nonverbal comms like eye contact. (In my case you could probably go further to say I don't interpret well or express well in non-verbal communication channels.)

Rather, while bringing people together in virtual spaces does probably help different peoples see each other with empathy, and diminish tribalistic attitudes... The wrong people are in the chat. Every nation that goes to war is itself fractured into classes. The people who send a nation to war are different from those on the battlefield. Empathy for the enemy on the part of soldiers doesn't prevent them being compelled to violence.

I think the exception might prove the rule in this case. I still believe the majority of people require the presence of some body language in order to connect with others, if this weren't the case then we would have abandoned meeting in person altogether long ago with the invention of the telephone or even writing since we've been sending letters to each other for a long time as you mention. Since most people don't connect well empathetically with others through text or images alone, I think the best thing we can do is to bring more human presence to long distance communications. If you prefer to stick with text or voice alone then no one is going to stop you but lots of other people will flock to a system that provides a close facsimile of in person conversation.

Such perspective isn't really so surrealistic, when we think about the lengths some governments and institutions go to stop people from talking to each other. Some countries censor the outside internet wholesale. Military conscripts are often chosen from more remote, poorer locations where people are less internationally-minded. Dividing people into ideological bubbles also seems to be a measure to stop people from talking to each other, in spite of sharing the same language and internet.

I sincerely feel like, if people spoke the same language, horrible shit would get harder to abide (and, no, Ukraine and Russian are not the same).

Imagine a video of Yemeni people starving to death on the news, but they sound just like you and your loved ones. It feels like that would turn the empathy WAY up.

But maybe I'm tripping into the same optimistic pitfall.

It is really bizarre the way that the aggregate/news/post/tweet + comment section + upvote/downvote format that is pervasive on the current internet creates an incentive for people not to talk to each other, but to just throw their ideas at the wall hoping to get points from people that agree with them or even points from bots.

Forums and chat rooms were nice because the communities were small and directed. People were jerks for sure but they weren’t getting points. Even among the jerks the communities were localized enough that the jerks that cared enough to stick around weren’t mere trolls.

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