I think social media has exacerbated what once was mostly hidden partisanship and extremism. You knew your neighbors and maybe waved at them etc. Now if you want you can find their posts on SM easily enough and perhaps discover they are radical Left or Right wingers. Couple this with the rife disinformation and silliness we all see on SM and you have stirred up a witches brew of extremism that now is out in the open.
Discussions that used to be largely private no longer are, and it stirs emotions, and I suspect some people who once were more centrist have become more extreme trying to counter whatever they heard from whoever they read.
Exactly. It used to be that you didn't likely know many of your relatives' political views. It's generally impolite to discuss it, and to a large extent you probably saw many of them 2-3 times a year at both. So except for crazy Uncle Phil who spouts off about politics like a crank every Thanksgiving, and who everyone essentially ignores because he's a boor, it doesn't come up.
Well, now you have to be "friends" with those relatives on Facebook. And they share memes. And argue with each other. And create divisions even within families where there need be none.
I literally witnessed my own father (using my mom's FB account because he doesn't have his own) arguing about NObama and Hitlery with my cousin Mary, who is a hardcore leftist and spouts off about Trump all the time. They don't even live in the same state any more, and very well may never see each other again within my parents' lifetimes! Why interact at all?!
I gave up. I still have a FB account for Messenger, but I don't "use" it or even look at it. I get... very stabby.
Add to all that confirmation bias .... I can find support for just about any position SOMEWHERE on the Internet, I just have to ignore a bunch of contrary information and discard that as being biased or from "experts" or extremists of the other side. This shows up in the climate change "discussion" obviously. All I need to do is cling to "experts" who write what I WANT to believe and ignore the rest.
This is huge. While we can complain about the "MSM" all we want, prior to the internet we all basically lived in the same world and shared the same facts.
Now you can construct your own reality based on the sources that already agree with you. To a large extend, Republicans and Democrats no longer even live in the same reality. When one side wonders how the other can believe something in the face of the evidence, they fail to realize that
they don't live in a reality where the evidence presented on both sides is the same. They used to say everyone's entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts. But if you can construct a world where you're never presented with facts that might make you uncomfortable, you now ARE entitled to your own facts!
I brought up in the coronavirus thread that there's a huge difficulty in turning data into information. The world is awash in data, and it's full of people who are going to try to twist that data into telling the story with the spin they want to present. So people can feel like they're working with the "facts", because they're too dumb to see how the data is being twisted to tell the story.
Any real attempt to delve into the matter even handedly is complicated, time consuming, and frankly confusing in some places.
It's a lot of work, and most people don't have the intelligence.
And now we confront another technical "crisis" or issue or problem, and "we" are simply not prepared to analyze it, so "we" develop an opinion, based on our political views, and then rush to find whatever supports that.
We've literally turned a pandemic into a political football. I'd like to say I'm surprised by that. I'm not. I am saddened, though.
