| I do agree that it might be inevitable, but it might not necessarily take the same for as it did in the past. A lot of what is feeding this is the rise of social media, ads, and analytics. We now have studies that show that somewhere around, 2010 I think it was, we saw a massive spike in the usage of certain words by news outlets. The context in which these specific words are used in are usually contexts that cause people to feel outrage. Newer news outlets, primarily the digital ones, realized that content that generates outrage gets the most people to share the story on social media, which means more people click on the story to read it, which mean more ad revenue for the news site. So you have people taking advantage of social media by writing sensationalized headlines day after day after day, which creates a warped sense of reality in people who see these stories day after day. Fueling this is the fact that social media in general and Twitter in particular tends to elevate the most extreme of content to the highest visibility, as well as the how easy it is to shut yourself out of the rest of the conversation, or conversations we don't like. What we get is an environment where radical opinions are the ones we see the most, and people all too willing to label the other side as evil, and thus not have any kind of meaningful conversation, and news organizations that have on some level I think, come to internalize the sensationalist headlines as the new norm, and thus what used to be extreme 10 years ago is considered their new norm, and they get even more extreme with their headlines, as the old extremes become the new normal, in many people's eyes not necessarily just theirs. The only way in my eyes to see this end is for people to get off of social media, sit down with the people they were previously having a flame war with, and just talk, and listen, actually listen, to what the other person is really saying. Cause on social media, if you don't actually know the person, our brain doesn't register it as a human interaction, so we tend not to filter our language in the same way as we would if talking face to face. The thing is, the extremes of both sides are tiny minorities, but they're the ones we see all the time cause they get propped up be news and social media, when is reality most people don't think like that. |
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