I don't think the idea of connecting people at mass is bad, large communities can and have worked out fine. What I think is the issue is that how Facebook and

I don't think the idea of connecting people at mass is bad, large communities can and have worked out fine. What I think is the issue is that how Facebook and similar sites do things is flawed. Why? Because unlike real life: 1. You only have one profile on said sites (in most cases), and that means people can easily connect your different interests together. 2. Groups who can't tolerate each other's existence are forced in a situation where they've got to interact on a regular basis, or where interactions are made fairly common. 3. And everything you do is public record forever. Those in turn are the issues that are causing all this social instability. Why? Well, think of it like this. For the former, people always present a different 'face' based on the group they're with and the situation they're in. Their family knows one side of them, their love interests know another site, their friends know another, their colleagues yet another and various authorities know different ones entirely. But social media services remove this. They give people one profile for everything, and expose groups who didn't want/need/have to know about some aspect of an individual to things they weren't really meant to know about. In the old days, an 'offensive' joke might reach 5 people who'd groan a bit and then forget about it. Now it reaches half the internet, leads to jobs being lost and causes flare ups between friends and families. They also force people together who can't be 'openly' tolerant of each other, and makes their existence hard to ignore for their enemies, Yes, lots of people in real life have 'abhorrent' views, but said views don't travel beyond people that agree with said views. Social media sites push said views in everyone's faces. What Facebook and co have caused isn't necessarily polarisation or what not. They haven't made views 'more' extreme. They've revealed the tensions underneath human society that were previously able to be ignored because people could get along and work together in ignorant bliss. They've made every 'bad' and 'offensive' viewpoint held by some group or another visible to those outside the groups they're intended for. Connecting people isn't the problem. Making visible things that shouldn't be visible to everyone and making every group and viewpoint too visible is.