I wonder if this might be part of the toxic mix making people more polarized than they were before.
Remember that black mirror episode where you had an implant in your eye that recorded everything you saw in life and could play it back for perfect recollection of all of life? And remember how knowing everything someone said or did with perfect memory was a bad thing?
I think social media does something similar but different, it allows people to REALLY get a clear sense about what others actually think and believe in a way that was not possible before. To know me is to love me? pfft, As a liberal who listens to talk radio, the more I listen, the more I despise a great many of those hosts and callers. I reserve islands of respect for some, but not as much as their used to be. And even that is more muted compared to the bile online. Quasi anonymity tends to encourage the most vicious forms of speech and discussion. I know anytime I look in the comments section of a breitbart article to expect nothing but puss and bile of miles. All of this paints a more vivid picture of my political enemies, and it inspires a desire to get out the roach spray rather than reach out and discuss things.
Or you all think this has less to do with the increased polarization and the answers lie elsewhere, like larger macro economic trends or social changes?
Yes.
Yes.
Social media allows people to only get opinions from like minded people. It creates a bubble that prevents new ideas from ever getting in.
Plus it allows people with fringe views to find like minded people to converse with. In the past, these people would just live alone with their weirdness, but now they can find other weirdos. It’s empowering! What was once a lone loon is now a movement (of loons).
Hell yes.
No. Furthermore, everyone who disagrees with me is obviously ill-informed. Wake up sheeple!
Too late to edit:
One other “feature” of the internet is that before, I suspected but couldn’t know how many assholes there were in the world, but now I know! You could ignore them and pretend they weren’t there, but not any more.
Wasn’t that really also true of newspapers, for a very long time? Every big city had a conservative paper and a liberal paper (or at least alternative press) and everyone pretty much read what they already agreed with.
(And Time Magazine vs. U.S. News and World Report. Wow. It was hard to believe those two were being published in the same reality!)
Another way to look at it: with the Internet, it’s now easier for people who who weren’t heard before to spread a message and show their treatment.
Yes, that’s vague. It’s deliberate.
Yes. Pre-internet people got input via the mass media and the mass media filtered out the extremes. Now no filtering is going on from the internet and the social media. [Yes I know there were extremist publications pre-internet–but they had circulations in the thousands and tens of thousand–not tens of millions]
People can (and do) create social networks of like-minded people who all agree with each others’ opinions and validate whatever they’re thinking. And worse, they can get these official looking publications online to support their views with what they regard as “evidence”.
I think the trend probably started back in the 1990s with the rise of cable television and AM radio. But it’s certainly worse now with social media.
I’d say no. It has made it easier to see how polarized people are and make it seem worse. The current situation has nothing on the late 60’s/early-70’s.
I guess I’ll have to take your word on it since I was not around then, but I remember seeing that the way people voted was more mixed and split ticket, that seems far more sorted now.
And to bolster my own assumption, take a look at this article and more importantly… the comments.
Now first of all, I think that was a dickish post, but look at the reaction of the conservatives in the comments section. She is nothing but a criminal to them, the sum total of her being is treated as being little different than some comment street thug, they want her deported.
And a guy who is supposedly trying to immigrate to the US from Canada comments about how HE is so virtuous because he is jumping through the legal hoops but he is really ticket at people like her because he thinks they make it harder for people like him. Good people.
… I hate that man. I really do, that entire attitude if absolutely #$%ing vile to me. He knows virtually nothing about that girl as a human being, but she is trash to him and most of those commenters because of something her parents did bringing her over. To see what truly harnesses their hatreds is a polarizing thing, because we do not share the same basis for hatreds.
I reserve genuinely hatred and malice towards people who actively seek to harm others. That is not that girl. Having some stray tax dollars go towards some of her k-12 school education is not in the same class, but if you are a conservative/libertarian type that treats such things as akin to a physical assault… again, the chasm of our conceptions of right and wrong, and true harm is so wide that I feel like I share almost nothing with such people.
I think social media offer people an opportunity to present and express secondhand opinions that they haven’t really thought deeply about.
I mean, that’s always been possible, but now it’s really easy - in fact, the content that’s being handled, itself often demands to be repeated (“if you care about babies with cancer, share this”).
And I think this problem can be a contributor to polarised views. It’s much easier to regard yourself as being the complete opposite of an opponent when you haven’t really thought very much about the argument. It’s also easier to become associated or aligned with the extreme of your own side, if you’re just reposting edgy infographics without actually engaging.
It also offers people the illusion that they are doing something. Reposting some complaint feels like activism, but is pretty impotent.
Social media permit people to be superficial, and thus easily manipulated into alignment. This was always possible, but the way in which social media have developed, offers a new toolset to the manipulators.
Yup. Last year Obama talked about the balkanization of the media. The most leftward 20% of the electorate and the most rightward 20% live in an echo chamber (myself included).
I really don’t know what the solution is, because I participate in it too. I watch a lot of mainstream unbiased news, but I get a ton of biased news and editorials designed to create a feeling of outrage and disgust at what the right is doing, just like their news makes them feel that way about the left.
Largely yes. People live more in echo chambers, socialize less, are exposed to more extreme views and have Politicians with more extreme views and less interaction with politicians of different parties.
This strikes me as being darkly comic. That is, I don’t live in the bubble and read far more people who disagree with me, or who would even despise me, than the reverse. I can say it has not resulted in me being much more sympathetic to them or their views, given that so much of the metaphorical ink goes to saying obnoxious, loathsome things about people. IN general, my opinion of humanity in the last view years has plummeted, and especially those who cast every single thing in political terms.
In addition to echo chambers I think the sheer amount of people that social media puts us in contact with makes us more willing to argue with the amount of vitriol we see today. Whats the point in holding back when arguing with Random Twitterer #152? Just tee off on them and move on. When your circle was smaller the people you interact with mean a little more.
Certainly.
Take the 'Dope. It leans left hard. There are a few right leaning folks but not many. Some on the 'Dope seem to think it is because people on the right are all stoopid, however it is much more the case that if you state an opinion that is out of line with the general leftiness of the board, you get called all sorts of things, none of which are nice.
So the conservative folks tend to leave to find people who don’t instantly hate them for just being.
Personally, I hate both the D and R parties. I have some liberal beliefs, some conservative. For the most part my beliefs are consistent, though not always, sucks being human sometimes.
Anyway, the echo chambers on both the left and the right get silly. I try and get news and opinion from both sides but frequently find myself insulted by both sides. I try and take that as a compliment, but it gets old so I tend to opt out and go read guitar boards or play Go.
Slee
I think that illustrates my point: in previous generations we wouldn’t have seen those comments but that polarity still existed. I think there’s also some recency bias. In the 70’s we forget that there was a long string of leftist groups (led by the Weathermen) setting off bombs throughout the country.
I don’t know how we could objectively measure polarity to make comparisons, though.
With Facebook, people can create their own echo chambers. Just defriend anyone who disagrees with you, and pretty much you have an insulated right-wing or left-wing bubble.