Culture and division in 'the information age'
Rather than bemoaning the impact social media has had on cultural tensions, we should work to recalibrate the way we rely on it in our personal lives.
The prospect of an AI apocalypse notwithstanding, our technological progress over the last century is something to behold… yet many blame this “information age” for much of our current political and cultural rot.
And it’s easy to see why. A quick perusal on social media makes it pretty obvious our collective hivemind of interconnected digital networks suffers from severe schizophrenia. The division and partisan absurdity on display following the indictment of a specific former president, for example, was so thick this week one could barely navigate the pathways of the world-wide web without a machete in hand.
And that’s to say nothing of the detrimental (and arguably far more serious) threat social media appears to pose for the mental well-being of younger generations. (That being said, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that parents who used to plop their 4-year-olds down with a tablet or smartphone to keep them quiet aren’t at least fractionally responsible for the upcoming generation’s unhealthy addiction to smart phones and social media feeds.)
Nonetheless, it’s still quite difficult to see how something as fundamentally transformative and democratizing as the internet could be anything other than a net-positive for humanity — it’s contribution to our current social dysfunctions notwithstanding.
The internet has made our world — all of its history, the cumulation of human knowledge and all of our cultures — more accessible than ever before. From turning long-distance communication into an effortless endeavor, to expanding the public square well beyond any given city center, the internet has transformed our lives in ways that have bettered the human experience beyond anything history would have thought possible.
The possibilities of our world, as a result, are endless — and our access to new ideas, new information and new experiences are equally infinite. Shouldn’t we, therefore, be experiencing a new era of human enlightenment with such technological advancements, rather than an unhealthy contagion of political tribalism and TikTok dance videos?
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