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Comment by DSingularity | Hacker News Reader

People are more isolated in the real world? Please provide a source. Aside from the fact that this is hard to measure now that the underlying medium has itself been modified — I would hardly expect this to be the case. Online I am connected to those whom I socialize with or am otherwise professionally connected to. In the “real world” this constraint is largely absent.

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This is the hardest source I can find, but it only measures what happens on Facebook. The numbers do seem higher than what I'd expect for IRL conversations, though:

https://research.fb.com/blog/2015/05/exposure-to-diverse-inf...

> Online I am connected to those whom I socialize with or am otherwise professionally connected to. In the “real world” this constraint is largely absent.

This seems entirely backwards to me? Maybe you talk more with strangers IRL than online, but I doubt it. I only have n=1 (me), but we are talking right now. Who knows where we live in relation to each other?

So much of politics is split between urban and rural environments. Those groups are defined by where they live, so I expect very few conversations in person between the two, especially about politics.

Thanks for the link. Reading now. Regarding my reply, I was thinking more about social networking apps like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, or linkedin and less about hackernews/reddit types. Mainly because I think the bulk of social interactions happen there.

It does seem logical: your in person interactions are mediated by your personal relationship with people. Online you can come across anything and everything. The in person equivalent would be walking by ten or twenty small protests set up with megaphones loudly arguing for various things you vehemently disagree with.

I highly doubt you and I are socially or professionally connected and yet here we are.

This connection doesn't mean shit compared to someone you see face to face and share experiences with. Yet this watered down form of connection seems to have replaced the latter, which I think is the fundamental social problem of the internet.

Does it matter the quality of the connection? The argument is about being shown different viewpoints and that the internet shows you more than in person.

Is that hard to disagree with? I didn’t even know atheism was a thing until I was on the Internet. No one in my community was an atheist and the media we were provided didn’t reference it much.

I think quality is almost the only thing that matters.

Personal anecdotes aside, we're mostly terrible at dealing with new ideas when they conflict with stuff we already know or is close to our identity. Remove the human element of the connection and we're even more likely to dismiss said conflicting ideas outright as stupid (I'll try link to that research). It's not hard to imagine how that might lead to strong yet poorly justified social division.

> In the “real world” this constraint is largely absent.

In the real world you are connected to people living and travelling around you, and that is not necessarily an unbiased set of people. It can be quite far from the average random group. You're still in a bubble.

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