I wouldn't call being on the receiving end of racial slurs for dating outside your "race", being shunned for being queer, and other such things mere "disagreements". (This was me, as a teen, in the 90s).
It is really easy to romanticize the past, back when you were younger and just didn't have the same grasp of the world. Especially if you had a decent enough life at the time.
I don't think this is true. I think a lot of people were insulated from information that created a perception for them that those disagreements didn't exist.
A lot of people are surprised to find out that people who don't live near them don't share their values.
Oh, that was always true. It just wasn’t possible for those people to spend all day yelling at each other for it.
The context of the disagreements was largely limited to newspapers and politicians. Some assumption of professionalism, editing and journalistic integrity was included with nationwide dialogues.
The internet, Twitter, political amplification, bot amplification, media consolidation, etc have made it 1000x worse.
Before, you could disagree on a topic and go about your day. Now you are beaten over the head with every topic constantly to remind you how much you disagree with it.
Some people could disagree on a topic and go about their day. That isn't true for everyone. One person's disagreement is another person's human rights.
A lot of people prefer the comfort of ignorance to the discomfort of that knowledge.
And other people just pretend and seek attention, taking the tiniest discomfort and screeching “human rights! human rights!” left right and centre. All while every government institution and corporation bends over backwards to please them.
A lot of people prefer the comfort of ignorance to the discomfort of that knowledge and even more prefer the comfort of their self made moral high horse from which they chastise everyone they deem unfit.
> I don't think this is true. I think a lot of people were insulated from information that created a perception for them that those disagreements didn't exist.
This is correct. The take away is something more along the lines of: when people don't know they disagree and therefore don't define themselves in terms of disagreement and further structure their lives around disagreement, they more readily work together; disagreements aren't attacks on personal branding/identity.
"A lot of people are surprised to find out that people who don't live near them don't share their values."
Maybe. I feel like those people might be living under a rock. With all the media today it seems unlikely that an individual isn't attacked on at least one belief. I know I see constant attacks on my beliefs.
The problem is that with fast transport, we are extending many laws to the larger geographic area (state or national level), which means increasing the size of the negatively affected groups since we are not homogeneous.
Everyone's gonna tell you this is fully explained by nostalgia and various cognitive biases, actually, cuz that's what we do hyea. But I'll back you all day. I know they literally can't hear it, but I always have the urge to tell Gen Y and later that for a minute in the mid-late 90's we had this shit mostly, not totally - that'll never happen - but mostly figured out. And then they blew it all up, and damned us all to hell. And they'll never, ever know that it happened.
> I know they literally can't hear it, but I always have the urge to tell Gen Y and later that for a minute in the mid-late 90's we had this shit mostly, not totally - that'll never happen - but mostly figured out.
I disagree. We didn't have it figured out - it just did not get on many folk's radar because of the differences in network effects prior to the internet. If you were a lonely kid in a farming town who wanted to dress and act like someone from the other biological gender you were shamed or shunned or cut-off. You were the weird one in your town. And that was something that everyone - EVERYONE - else in your town, no matter how empathic or sympathetic, would agree upon.
People who were "odd" just didn't know they could expect a better world. If you were coloured you just sucked up the jokes. If you were gay you hid - or you ran away to places where the network effects were more beneficial. You just dealt with it, and left the normal people to the belief that shit was figured out.
Except for us spectrum types - from about 1997 onwards EVERYONE wanted a piece of us.
Yes, outcasts used the internet to find and support each other online. And we noticed this great thing quite a while ago. But it seems only more recently did we also become aware of the other side... it similarly boosting toxic communities, isolated echo chambers, etc.
If someone wanted to, lets say, "make love with toasters", he'd be looked at weird and gotten over it in the days before the internet. Now he'll find supporting communities and guidance on how to do so...
So yeah, we didn't "have it figured out" and in many aspects, online communities do provide great benefit. But i wonder, if they still are, once all is added up.
This post here is still engaging in armchair psych diagnosis. No behavior, regardless of what it is, is regarded as clinical pathology if it doesn't harm others or the individual.
Someone living a functional, happy, fulfilling life, while having sex with toasters as their main sexuality is a functional, happy person. There is no problem there.
Whereas someone doing this and say, neglecting other life functions, or injuring themselves, or reporting it as a compulsion they would like to stop, has now met the very base level criteria to be regarded as having a mental pathology.
But that's the bar: going through the DSM and matching symptoms doesn't make for a diagnosis if the symptoms don't cause the person unhappiness, or those who interact with them danger or harm.
I would go further and say we actually do have quite a bit of hard evidence that societal disagreements were more civil several decades ago. Bipartisan legislation, violent threats against public figures, mass murders, and attempts to violently overthrow an election have all gotten objectively worse since the rise of the internet.
I don't know how much the internet has caused this deterioration, but it is strongly correlated.
Just looking at the 90s to today is ignoring an awful lot of context about what political tensions in the US actually used to look like.
Just over 100 years ago, political disagreements in West Virginia over unionization led to a full-scale paramilitary battle at Blair Mountain [1], with upwards of 13,000 people involved and complete with the anti-unionization side bringing in private planes as improved bombers.
You say objectively, so where's your data? I must be very hard to measure pre-internet violent threats. I know someone who personally told me he'd kill George Bush if he had the chance. That won't be in your records, so how can you measure it?
Which is a weird phenomenon in and of itself right?
The amount of political violence pre-internet is just an order of magnitude higher than today’s. Most young people (millennials, Gen Z) are completely unaware - unless you studied this stuff - that e.g. the Senate building was bombed in 1983 by a bunch of leftists upset over the US’s involvement in Lebanon.
This is to say, I’m skeptical of the argument that the internet has made things worse. Definitely not better, maybe not worse.
I think it depends how you look at it. The intensity of the conflict has diminished, but I think the scope of the conflict has increased. There are fewer bombs going off, but there seems to be a lot more family estrangement due to political differences.
The partisan lines in my extended family haven't changed for as long as I can remember, but there are fewer get-togethers and more political arguments at the dinner table when they do happen. The aunt and uncle that once were my god parents have now stopped talking to my parents; nobody's political opinions changed but differences in opinion that were once barely worth mentioning are now considered actually evil.
I think it depends on what's considered political. Family estrangement due to religious differences (such as marrying a catholic) was so commonplace it was practically a sitcom joke. There was also family estrangement about potentially dating outside your race.
Heh, my family is mixed Lutheran and Catholic, but that's not the line it split along. My mother and her sister are Lutheran, while their husbands are Catholics. I'm aware of this social schism only in the academic sense; it's not something I've ever personally seen or experienced.
These are people who more or less believe the same sort of thing, but disagree about which party will best implement it. It's a difference that used to not matter very much; my cousins were raised almost identically to me and my siblings. There is no real difference in social or economic class, lifestyle, or community. Simply partisan affiliation.
I should clarify that I'm inquiring whether or not not dating based on religion or race is considered political, because if it is, it brings into question the idea that estrangement for political reasons is a relatively new phenomenon. It might be better to suggest estrangement for political party affiliation might be relatively new.
I mostly agree with this. I think we can describe it as: vertical conflict has decreased (kinetic action up and down the political spectrum), while horizontal conflict has increased (passive action across the political spectrum). Things like actual assassination attempts against major figures in government (Justice Kavanaugh's assassination attempt notwithstanding) are not as common today as they were 40-50 years ago, while separation from peers for political reasons is much more common.
See also the pro-Puerto Rican independence terrorists who in the 1950s a) invaded the Capitol (!) to try to assassinate Congressmen, and b) invaded the temporary White House to try to assassinate Harry Truman (!!). Completely forgotten about in popular memory, despite their murdering law enforcement in the process.
Right, social media is the updated form of sensational headlines selling newspapers. And such headlines have always played on difference, resentment and moral values. And the more glaring and outrageous they are the more business profits from them.
This is a serious issue for society to resolve, especially given the clear evidence that many people cannot distinguish sensationalism from fact and are thus influenced by it.
Given the billions of dollars profit involved and the social media addiction problem it has to be one of the most intractable problems of our age to solve.
> many people cannot distinguish sensationalism from fact and are thus influenced by it.
People are generally punished throughout their lives for being ignorant. But lack of comprehension is sometimes feigned. Some people test the tolerance of their behaviour.
The existence of propanda is at once a difficult problem and a profitable problem. There is no bright side to propaganda.
In cases where people are materially punished for their bad behaviour, they shut up and pay attention. I think it likely that future social-media business will require user accounts to have verified identities and users to accept responsibility by risking direct, personal financial loss for their behaviour.
People may call this tyranny, but in fact it's how society works despite their resentment.
> So instead how about this theory: the internet in general was pretty wealth-marked in 1998 (far more than we realized, with our American mythology of universal white suburban middle-classness and “global village” Internet mythology) BUT, of people who were more wealthy in 1998, the most likely to NOT have internalized upper-class practices were the grandfathers from the “Silent” or “Greatest” generations before the postwar “mass middle class”. Our parents were beavery professionals who settled into the suburban cocoon, we knew we were destined for glory (or at least selective colleges) from birth, but THEY were socialized into some pool hall, street gang, farmhand, enlisted man kinda culture where boldness of assertion counted more than patient derivation from shared principles.
> And if the Anglophone internet is ::gestures:: like this now maybe it’s cause it’s less of a professional-class preserve? The dividing line maybe being smartphones where “people on the internet” went from “people who specifically spend $X/mo on it as luxury” to “people with telephone service”? That’s a real possibility, that for all the “Global Village” stuff the wondrous effect of the ‘90s internet was to create a cultural space that was MORE gatekept by wealth and education.
> That’s… kind of depressing, though. “Haha you thought the world was getting better because you were eliminating elitist barriers but actually it’s cause you were making them higher, which is good because the poor and non-elite are disproportionately idiots with worthless ideas and to the extent they’re on top of things the thing they’re on top of is undermining the basis of a good society, and anyway those times were a phenomenon of a narrow early adopter base and you’ll never ever get them back unless you make the non-elite economically and politically irrelevant.”
> Depressing but very well precedented, that’s exactly the arc newsprint, radio, and TV followed before.
People always say this. But I have a hard time believing things weren't more divisive, say, during The Vietnam War.
The internet makes conflicts more visible. It also attenuates them, so fewer people get killed. Physical conflict is transformed into digital conflict.
I’m specifically talking about the 90s and not all pre-internet time periods.
Cold War was over, Berlin Wall came down, Gulf War was over on almost the first day thanks to stealth technology. Comedy was at a high point, music was diverse and fun.
There was a lot more happy and a lot less angry in people.
Speaking of which-- what ever happened to the guy who did the "women be shoppin'" Def Jam parody in the nutty professor? I remember he appeared on some talk shows at the time but it's as if he dropped off the face of the earth in the 2000s, 2010s and the past year.
Whoever he was, 90s comedy was surely the pinnacle by any measure I can think of.
We had disagreements, but nothing compared to what we see today.