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This is pretty meandering, and some parts are quite good. However... I feel like this relies on a narrow perspective of the past. Did people's belief systems n

This is pretty meandering, and some parts are quite good. However... I feel like this relies on a narrow perspective of the past. Did people's belief systems not work this way in the past? I mean, the social internet is new, and that changes things, but what's our baseline? Religion, for example, has always been good at dividing us into sects with competing narrative beliefs. A lot of the emotion, tension and conflict that results from a church schism is similar to the political schisms cited here. Religion also sometimes encourages "alternate reality games" as described here. Find clues in scripture, the flight of birds or whatnot. See a deeper reality than all those fools. Religious devotees alway "produce and consume game materiel" in much the same way. Your chances of convincing a MAGA, BLM or any other modern political devotee to reform might seem slim... but they're much better than with religion. In fact, they usually fizzle out naturally while religious beliefs are very resilient. Anyway, my point isn't to bash religion, it's to say that maybe this is all just normal human behavior. Maybe the TV era was the unusual phenomenon. Maybe we're not all supposed to believe the same things.

SkipperCat 4y ago
I remember pre-internet, and it was hard to find communities of people who deviated from societal norms. If you strongly believed in something that was way off from what society beloved or accepted, you were alone and your drive for that topic probably fizzled out after a while. It was also hard to reinforce your belief system if CBS, ABC and NBC didn't share your views. Now, in Internet-world, you can instantly get connected with like minded folks and have your beliefs accepted, which probably reinforces your stance even more. So I guess the baseline is, back in the pre-Facebook days, there were just less people on the fringe.
coldtea 4y ago
>Religion, for example, has always been good at dividing us into sects with competing narrative beliefs. A lot of the emotion, tension and conflict that results from a church schism Usually it was the opposite: emotion, tension and conflict for political and national/group interest reasons, were translated into church language. That's why the religion divisions were seldom, if ever, within the same demographic, but between groups that already had historical grievances or were beginning to have something to divide (as nations, classes, cultural groups, private interests, and so on). Of course it's never 100% clean, as there would also be a feedback loop - but the underlying cause were almost always some interest, not theological.
jacobsenscott 4y ago
> Religion, for example, has always been good at dividing us into sects with competing narrative beliefs I would say the opposite is true. Over time the number of religions in the world has become less - larger and larger groups uniting under fewer and fewer religions. The same is true for cultures, languages, ideologies, etc. They are all just variations of imagined stories. The world is united to a degree never seen before in history. However I think perhaps society saw peak unification in the 90's and maybe 00's. It seems society is re-fracturing into smaller groups again. It is perhaps remarkable that we had such a level of unification for as long as we did, and there is no reason to believe society will ever return to that state.

SkipperCat 4y ago

I remember pre-internet, and it was hard to find communities of people who deviated from societal norms. If you strongly believed in something that was way off from what society beloved or accepted, you were alone and your drive for that topic probably fizzled out after a while. It was also hard to reinforce your belief system if CBS, ABC and NBC didn't share your views. Now, in Internet-world, you can instantly get connected with like minded folks and have your beliefs accepted, which probably reinforces your stance even more. So I guess the baseline is, back in the pre-Facebook days, there were just less people on the fringe.

coldtea 4y ago

>Religion, for example, has always been good at dividing us into sects with competing narrative beliefs. A lot of the emotion, tension and conflict that results from a church schism Usually it was the opposite: emotion, tension and conflict for political and national/group interest reasons, were translated into church language. That's why the religion divisions were seldom, if ever, within the same demographic, but between groups that already had historical grievances or were beginning to have something to divide (as nations, classes, cultural groups, private interests, and so on). Of course it's never 100% clean, as there would also be a feedback loop - but the underlying cause were almost always some interest, not theological.

jacobsenscott 4y ago

> Religion, for example, has always been good at dividing us into sects with competing narrative beliefs I would say the opposite is true. Over time the number of religions in the world has become less - larger and larger groups uniting under fewer and fewer religions. The same is true for cultures, languages, ideologies, etc. They are all just variations of imagined stories. The world is united to a degree never seen before in history. However I think perhaps society saw peak unification in the 90's and maybe 00's. It seems society is re-fracturing into smaller groups again. It is perhaps remarkable that we had such a level of unification for as long as we did, and there is no reason to believe society will ever return to that state.