4 ms·

In the 90s before mass internet adoption, it sure felt like it. We had disagreements, but nothing compared to what we see today.

forbiddenvoid 4y ago
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.
- brightball 4y ago
  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.
  - forbiddenvoid 4y ago
    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.
    - brightball 4y ago
      And other people prefer to incite people to better control them via polarization.
    - throwawayacc2 4y ago
      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.
- kansface 4y ago
  > 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.
- giantg2 4y ago
  "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. Edit: why disagree?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
psyc 4y ago
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.
- rurp 4y ago
  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.
  - coryrc 4y ago
    The, uh, US civil war. The Tulsa massacre. Emmett Till Murders have dropped every decade for the last five.
  - MarkPNeyer 4y ago
    There were bombings almost every day in the US in the 1970’s.
    - puffoflogic 4y ago
      We're not allowed to talk about those any more.
      - remarkEon 4y ago
        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.
Broken_Hippo 4y ago
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.
- thomassmith65 4y ago
  That is true, but the difference between then and now is that, back then, it felt like the world was on an inexorable road to greater open-mindedness. The world has made progress since you were a teen, but there is also an atmosphere of fear that the world is starting to backslide.
  - tomrod 4y ago
    Jasper, TX?
barry-cotter 4y ago
> 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. https://kontextmaschine.tumblr.com/post/185164859368/your-granddad-on-the-internet https://kontextmaschine.tumblr.com/post/185164859368/your-gr...
heresie-dabord 4y ago
Humans are social in so far as they derive benefit from society. But they have always resented society to varying degrees. In the past, people's resentment was mostly expressed in casual ways because a society tends to suppress crazy behaviour. But the social media business profits from this social resentment.
- hilbert42 4y ago
  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. But solve it we must.
  - heresie-dabord 4y ago
    > 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.
    - hilbert42 4y ago
      Exactly. That's better expressed and more comprehensive than my comment.
slibhb 4y ago
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.
- brightball 4y ago
  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.
  - jancsika 4y ago
    > Comedy was at a high point It really was. 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.
  - BarryMilo 4y ago
    Just because things seemed peaceful doesn't mean people were happy. See negative versus positive peace: https://www.visionofhumanity.org/defining-the-concept-of-peace/ https://www.visionofhumanity.org/defining-the-concept-of-pea...
anonporridge 4y ago
Bullshit. In the 90s, it was just easier to remain in a comfortable bubble of ignorance of just how violently people disagreed. Today, the reality of the discord is shoved in our faces every day.

forbiddenvoid 4y ago

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.

brightball 4y ago
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.
- forbiddenvoid 4y ago
  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.
  - brightball 4y ago
    And other people prefer to incite people to better control them via polarization.
  - throwawayacc2 4y ago
    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.
kansface 4y ago
> 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.
giantg2 4y ago
"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. Edit: why disagree?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

psyc 4y ago

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.

rurp 4y ago
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.
- coryrc 4y ago
  The, uh, US civil war. The Tulsa massacre. Emmett Till Murders have dropped every decade for the last five.
- MarkPNeyer 4y ago
  There were bombings almost every day in the US in the 1970’s.
  - puffoflogic 4y ago
    We're not allowed to talk about those any more.
    - remarkEon 4y ago
      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.

Broken_Hippo 4y ago

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.

thomassmith65 4y ago
That is true, but the difference between then and now is that, back then, it felt like the world was on an inexorable road to greater open-mindedness. The world has made progress since you were a teen, but there is also an atmosphere of fear that the world is starting to backslide.
- tomrod 4y ago
  Jasper, TX?

barry-cotter 4y ago

> 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. https://kontextmaschine.tumblr.com/post/185164859368/your-granddad-on-the-internet https://kontextmaschine.tumblr.com/post/185164859368/your-gr...

heresie-dabord 4y ago

Humans are social in so far as they derive benefit from society. But they have always resented society to varying degrees. In the past, people's resentment was mostly expressed in casual ways because a society tends to suppress crazy behaviour. But the social media business profits from this social resentment.

hilbert42 4y ago
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. But solve it we must.
- heresie-dabord 4y ago
  > 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.
  - hilbert42 4y ago
    Exactly. That's better expressed and more comprehensive than my comment.

slibhb 4y ago

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.

brightball 4y ago
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.
- jancsika 4y ago
  > Comedy was at a high point It really was. 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.
- BarryMilo 4y ago
  Just because things seemed peaceful doesn't mean people were happy. See negative versus positive peace: https://www.visionofhumanity.org/defining-the-concept-of-peace/ https://www.visionofhumanity.org/defining-the-concept-of-pea...

anonporridge 4y ago

Bullshit. In the 90s, it was just easier to remain in a comfortable bubble of ignorance of just how violently people disagreed. Today, the reality of the discord is shoved in our faces every day.