People see what they want to see in it, other people see it causing divisiveness where you see it causing conformity. It will take us decades to understand the effects.
In decades there won't be anyone around who remembers when things were different.
We're in an interesting time right now, when at least 50% of people in first-world countries remember a time before the internet (obviously higher in countries with less internet adoption)
In 70 years, everyone alive will have grown up in a world where the Internet was everywhere.
Yeah but in more time I think we'll eventually figure it out. The invention of Gutenberg's Printing Press was massively disruptive of both Europe and the Islamic world and in Europe kicked off hundreds of years of war. Eventually we got used to the fact that you can't trust everything you read on print. Hopefully we'll work something out with the internet as well.
These aren't mutually exclusive. I see the internet as mostly segmenting us into separate echo chambers that do not want to compromise. In the past, most people learned some degree of empathy because while they support policy X they also talk to their neighbor who hates policy X because of reasons A, B, and C. Now people will just ignore their neighbor who hates X and instead go online and find a community that builds their identity atop hating a bevy of policies that include X.
There's definitely pros to this as instead of having to hide things like your sexual orientation in your community due to bigotry you can go online and find others like you. There are also cons abound, where instead of (for example, not trying to push policy here) ranting about how nobody rides the bus and encountering your neighbor whose car broke down and is riding the bus you instead go online and talk to other people who think buses are stupid.
Bullshit indeed, but for your disagreement. Just a brief look at the general opinion regarding cryptocurrencies, bitcoin and a number of other positions clearly shows a certain hive mind tendency. It's not complete and there are indeed many dissenting voices with their own nuanced opinions, but the downvote and upvote system is also present to further encourage groupthink positions.
I don’t think it’ll take decades to understand the many many obvious effects. Saying it’ll take decades to work out the effects feels like an attempt to obsfucate or deflect.
Although I’d agree if you are referring to secondary effects — they will take a little longer to manifest. But we are certainly seeing some of those already.
