Comment by manigandham
5 years ago
What magical moment? You seem to be reaching for extremes rather than accepting the very reasonable assertion that the vast majority of people now pick a side and never engage in any dialogue.
All those characteristics you mentioned are outward and secondary to the one that matters the most - the way you think. The original post said "varying opinions". Your beliefs, character and worldview are far more important than what you look like and you had to actually communicate with people to understand this. This built much better dialogue and interactions.
Now it takes a few taps to block millions based on assumptions and the most tenuous associations, as well as surface attributes like you mentioned. Someone merely liking a post you disagree with is enough to end a relationship. New perspectives being easier to experience also means they're easier to block, and the latter is the issue being discussed.
As far as "right to free speech" is concerned, I don't see what it has to do with this but regardless you also have a right to not participate in any discussion. Nobody is forcing you to talk, and nobody ever could.
I'm not the one who started with the comparison between past and present. The original post I was responding to was clearly saying that people were better in the past.
My assertion is simple: people have always lived in bubbles (honestly this is so blatantly true it's hilarious anyone even tries to argue against it) and the internet has only strengthened those bubbles in so far as it has forced people to confront the edges of them more readily.
No one ever had to "block millions" until twitter existed. The concept was meaningless. Every day of anyone's life before the internet every single person was ignoring the lives of countless people who had no way to reach them, an effective but implicit block on literally everything uncomfortable in the world.
> "the internet has only strengthened those bubbles"
This is, quite literally, what the original poster was saying though. Nobody is arguing that bubbles never existed (again let's please avoid the extremes) but that they were much more permeable before.
Of course you don't interact with those you can't reach. Some barriers, physical or otherwise, will always exist. However people who did reach each other would interact much more freely because you didn't have any other way to know more about them in the first place. Now your social reputation precedes you, even if it's not created by you but rather an amalgamation of data points constructing some skewed halo, and it's used to stop interaction before it can ever start.
That's the fundamental issue raised in this thread. Do you not agree with this premise?
I disagree with your characterization of the post I was originally replying to. While I'm sure no one believes there were "no bubbles ever" I do think that the content of that post implies a pretty far off from reality level of bubble permeability in the past.
Also, extremes are useful tools for examining assumptions.
As for the rest, in so far as online interactions have different boundaries and background information levels, I think you have to work harder to demonstrate that these interactions aren't (current covid-world aside) in addition to rather than replacing in person interactions people largely had before. Until we're all walking around with google glass to tell us all about everyone we meet, you are still free to go talk to the person on the street corner about their life.
But even then, your social status has always proceeded you to some degree. Again, your race, visible evidence of your wealth (clothes, haircut, etc), visible elements of queerness or lack thereof, and visible gender, your language and speech patterns are all elements of social signalling that have always acted as barriers to communication between in and out groups of those people.
On the internet, some of these can be mitigated or erased. On the street, while dating, in the workplace they cannot. They are data points that tell someone a lot about you (as with social media, within some error bars) before you even interact.
Again, these are changes in the structure of the outer edges of our bubbles and do not argue for a change in the scope or degree of our bubbles on their own.
>It's easier now to experience perspectives
>the internet has only strengthened those bubbles
I’m having a hard time tracking whether you think things are better or worse now, unless you are asserting the contact hypothesis is wrong
People have to work harder now to maintain bubbles like people had in the past naturally, especially on platforms like twitter.
I don't think this speaks specifically to whether or not "things are better/worse now," it's a criticism of a particular pop-psych trope angle of measuring it.
I think the contact hypothesis is correct. People interacting with people they're bigoted against will generally ease or counteract their bigotry.
I also think that people overestimate the degree to which contact happened in the past and mistake modern forms of 'bubble-friction' (for lack of a better term) being more visible than the silent, implicit kinds in the past for it being new.
Middle class and rich white people literally left north american inner cities to struggle on their own with reduced tax bases to escape having to interact with black people. They did this quietly, and they did it in a way that appeared individualistic and rational.
The effect was far more profound than any possible consequence of being blocked on twitter or yelled at on facebook, but it was very easy to ignore happening.
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