i’ve been thinking a lot recently about how the internet has affected how people relate to each other... like idk if this is an american thing specifically, but y’know how people will be like “you don’t talk about politics or religion in polite conversation”. i’m Pretty Sure it’s an american thing to not want to talk about politics but anyway i feel like that probably contributed to how incapable people (esp americans obvs, of which there are a lot) are of discussing things in a reasonable way. like it used to be that here a lot of the time people just didn’t talk about politics, and suddenly you have social media that allows people to say things that they might not otherwise have ever said out loud, but you’ve never learned how to take criticism well, or how to not take disagreement personally, or how to avoid identifying yourself with a concept to the point that a criticism of the concept feels like a criticism of your very Being.

like, before internet use grew widespread and older people started using social media, so many people could probably go their whole lives without being significantly challenged on the views they’ve been taught, so they probably never learned how to gracefully respond to their beliefs being challenged, so of course instead they respond defensively (often bc they over-identify with their beliefs, so questioning, say, the ethics of assigning legal sex at birth becomes a question of their worth as a person, bc they’ve literally never had to defend, explain, or think about their political positions), and it’s easier to dig your heels in and protect your sense of identity than it is to ask yourself “what would it mean if this was true?” “what would it mean for my world view/values if this was true?”. like, even if you end up disagreeing with whatever it is that’s challenging, being able to engage with it at all is a skill that so many people are just not taught whatsoever (myself included).

like, you get so many people who never would have interacted with one another, or would never have had an outlet to say the kinds of things that social media allows people to say and talk about (not just negative things/political things either, just in general), and you can be at least partially anonymous, or have, at least, some degree of barrier between your physical self and the people you interact with online, and then you toss in algorithms, and social media platforms like twitter that are genuinely antithetical to nuanced discussion bc of the character limit, general social norms discouraging long threads and especially long thread replies to other people, and an algorithm that has “learned” that the things that generate the most engagement are things that make people angry or upset, and you’ve created the conditions to not just not allow people to learn how to engage with other ideas in good faith, but you’re actively galvanizing them against change.

like, i just keep thinking about it lately, and how it created a whole new mode of social interaction that, in a society that actually cared to teach people about conflict resolution, critical thinking, engaging in good faith discussion, changing your mind (bc we place so much value societally on remaining the same, while changing our mind/going through phases/literally just Changing are viewed as signs of weakness, immorality, immaturity, lack of sincerity, etc.), might have avoided the types of extremism and general shittiness that we see today. like who could have predicted how the internet would shape our culture and psyches the way it has?

idk i have a lot of thoughts about this, but it’s hard to put it all into words... tl;dr: i keep thinking about how the internet has both changed how we relate to one another, And it’s revealed societal issues that already existed, but were swept under the rug, like the abject failure of american(/western?) society to give people the life skills to engage with and resolve conflict, think critically, to let go of beliefs that no longer serve us and integrate new information into our world views/belief systems without letting our ego/pride get in the way, etc.