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I believe the parent comment is describing how most people had friends of various backgrounds that they saw physically and communicated with freely - instead of having a social filter over digital connections that blocked them immediately before they ever really knew them.

> "internet finally forcing people to coexist with social groups they could just ignore until now"

How so? The internet has made it much easier to isolate and block than ever before. That's exactly why there's so much division today.

> "you're scared of that anger and those people's unwillingness"

What are you talking about here?

> I believe the parent comment is describing how most people had friends of various backgrounds that they saw physically and communicated with freely - instead of having a social filter over digital connections that blocked them immediately before they ever really knew them.

In person or not, everyone has a social filter on who they interact with. Your wealth, race, gender, orientation, interests, and location all act as filters against who you'll interact with, let alone be friends with. If you go to Harvard, how much relative opportunity do you think that gives you to befriend someone who isn't a rich white person? Especially, ya know, when only white people (white men, even) could even go to Harvard.

These filters are more or less permeable by the culture and scope of your life, but if you think there's some magical moment in the past when white people by an large all had black friends or rich people all had poor friends, you're dreaming.

It's easier now to experience perspectives alien to you by a country mile. It's also easier for them to intrude into your life.

Somehow, it's the most privileged people are the most likely to call this intrusion an attack. To call people wanting to re-establish boundaries with them a violation of their 'right to free speech'. Funny that.

Let's slow down on calling anyone else privileged when most of us are in arguably the most privileged profession to ever exist.

A few things are true about wealth distribution, it's empirically become more concentrated and also more localized to elite urban areas. When people from this urban elite start calling everyone else privileged and intolerant to the point that they don't deserve a voice.. it's not a great look.

Or, people here could admit their privilege rather than try to deny it. I am absolutely privileged on some very very important axes (somewhat the opposite in others). I'm throwing stones in the glass house because the glass house is shitty.

I don't know if you realize it but you seem to give yourself a more nuanced existence while denying that same understanding in others' parent comments.

You (rightly) acknowledged that you can be privileged in some areas but disadvantaged in others, but seem to take the stance in a previous statement that there is no progress, just "gilded age nonsense" because there are still marginalized groups.

We can acknowledge progress while still admitting there is a lot of work to be done. There's no reason to treat them as mutually exclusive. My worry is that those who take the alternate stance ironically end up alienating potential allies. Or, to butcher the old idiom, they fail to realize that expecting perfection can get in the way of progress.

Sorry, how have I argued there has been no progress?

I would certainly say that on social issues I do not believe there has been enough progress, but there absolutely has been a lot of progress.

On the specific issue of bubbles, I have argued for a complex view that the nature of the boundaries of people's social bubbles have changed. As I don't think there's a good way to measure this I take as a baseline that it may have largely stayed the same but the way we experience conflict over it has changed.

Your previous dismissal of in-person social interaction as evidence comes across as stating there was no progress on this front until the internet "finally" forced people to interact across cultural lines. My apologies if I misinterpreted your point.

Oh, I mean, I think the bubbles have shifted to some degree historically depending on culture and conflict but did largely remain within the scope possible with in person interaction. Exposure to groups outside an individual's own has grown with every communication invention as well, from books to newspapers to radio to phones to the internet.

Social media I think does, however, represent an exponential growth in how much "outside perspective" people are exposed to, as well as the intrusiveness of those perspectives. All those other communication inventions required filtering perspectives through layers of privilege (media, basically).

On social media though I can post a tweet about my lunch and have someone from across the ocean tell me I deserve to die for who I am in the replies to it. No one in history has ever had to face that level of forced interaction on so mundane a social act until now.

And that's why we put up walls. To get back to where we were 20 years ago. Not because we can't handle "disagreement", but because when I'm eating lunch I don't want to be told I don't deserve to live.

Thanks for elaborating.

I think where the disagreement may be is that the internet (defined as the applications, not as the infrastructure), and social media in particular, isn't optimized for open communication or sharing different viewpoints. It's optimized for capturing our attention. Unfortunately, the way it often does this is by hijacking our psychology; one way is by confirmation bias and another is by inducing outrage (which strengthens our pre-existing beliefs). The flow of information is not "free"; it's curated to the ends of the attention economy so even while there is a lot more availability of information, it's passing through some filters that may not be the most productive for society. In other words, it's designed to reinforce our pre-existing beliefs rather than challenge them.

Those filters become social media's own "layers of privileges" to a certain extent. I think the downside with those compared to previous media is that the new filters are much more difficult to interpret compared with, say, a newspaper's political leanings.

What magical moment? You seem to be reaching for extremes rather than accepting the very reasonable assertion that the vast majority of people now pick a side and never engage in any dialogue.

All those characteristics you mentioned are outward and secondary to the one that matters the most - the way you think. The original post said "varying opinions". Your beliefs, character and worldview are far more important than what you look like and you had to actually communicate with people to understand this. This built much better dialogue and interactions.

Now it takes a few taps to block millions based on assumptions and the most tenuous associations, as well as surface attributes like you mentioned. Someone merely liking a post you disagree with is enough to end a relationship. New perspectives being easier to experience also means they're easier to block, and the latter is the issue being discussed.

As far as "right to free speech" is concerned, I don't see what it has to do with this but regardless you also have a right to not participate in any discussion. Nobody is forcing you to talk, and nobody ever could.

I'm not the one who started with the comparison between past and present. The original post I was responding to was clearly saying that people were better in the past.

My assertion is simple: people have always lived in bubbles (honestly this is so blatantly true it's hilarious anyone even tries to argue against it) and the internet has only strengthened those bubbles in so far as it has forced people to confront the edges of them more readily.

No one ever had to "block millions" until twitter existed. The concept was meaningless. Every day of anyone's life before the internet every single person was ignoring the lives of countless people who had no way to reach them, an effective but implicit block on literally everything uncomfortable in the world.

>It's easier now to experience perspectives

>the internet has only strengthened those bubbles

I’m having a hard time tracking whether you think things are better or worse now, unless you are asserting the contact hypothesis is wrong

People have to work harder now to maintain bubbles like people had in the past naturally, especially on platforms like twitter.

I don't think this speaks specifically to whether or not "things are better/worse now," it's a criticism of a particular pop-psych trope angle of measuring it.

I think the contact hypothesis is correct. People interacting with people they're bigoted against will generally ease or counteract their bigotry.

I also think that people overestimate the degree to which contact happened in the past and mistake modern forms of 'bubble-friction' (for lack of a better term) being more visible than the silent, implicit kinds in the past for it being new.

Middle class and rich white people literally left north american inner cities to struggle on their own with reduced tax bases to escape having to interact with black people. They did this quietly, and they did it in a way that appeared individualistic and rational.

The effect was far more profound than any possible consequence of being blocked on twitter or yelled at on facebook, but it was very easy to ignore happening.

Thanks for the well-reasoned reply. I think the angle one of the other commenters may have been taking is that the "social filter" (i.e., social network algorithms) reinforce bubbles rather than, as you say, make people "work harder now to maintain bubbles".

I think some of the work by people like Tristan Harris and Renee Diresta support this. The attention economy works in large part simultaneously on outrage and confirmation bias. To some of the parent comment points, not interacting in the real world may short-circuit the ability for us to confront different views while simultaneously acknowledging others humanity.

>white people literally left north american inner cities to struggle on their own with reduced tax bases to escape having to interact with black people.

White flight is a real thing, but I think the plight of these cities is much more complicated than to be distilled to a single feature like race. As an example, Detroit went from one of the wealthiest cities to bankrupt in a generation. White flight is part of this, as is corruption, as is poor economic diversification, and a host of other issues.

> "the internet has only strengthened those bubbles"

This is, quite literally, what the original poster was saying though. Nobody is arguing that bubbles never existed (again let's please avoid the extremes) but that they were much more permeable before.

Of course you don't interact with those you can't reach. Some barriers, physical or otherwise, will always exist. However people who did reach each other would interact much more freely because you didn't have any other way to know more about them in the first place. Now your social reputation precedes you, even if it's not created by you but rather an amalgamation of data points constructing some skewed halo, and it's used to stop interaction before it can ever start.

That's the fundamental issue raised in this thread. Do you not agree with this premise?

I disagree with your characterization of the post I was originally replying to. While I'm sure no one believes there were "no bubbles ever" I do think that the content of that post implies a pretty far off from reality level of bubble permeability in the past.

Also, extremes are useful tools for examining assumptions.

As for the rest, in so far as online interactions have different boundaries and background information levels, I think you have to work harder to demonstrate that these interactions aren't (current covid-world aside) in addition to rather than replacing in person interactions people largely had before. Until we're all walking around with google glass to tell us all about everyone we meet, you are still free to go talk to the person on the street corner about their life.

But even then, your social status has always proceeded you to some degree. Again, your race, visible evidence of your wealth (clothes, haircut, etc), visible elements of queerness or lack thereof, and visible gender, your language and speech patterns are all elements of social signalling that have always acted as barriers to communication between in and out groups of those people.

On the internet, some of these can be mitigated or erased. On the street, while dating, in the workplace they cannot. They are data points that tell someone a lot about you (as with social media, within some error bars) before you even interact.

Again, these are changes in the structure of the outer edges of our bubbles and do not argue for a change in the scope or degree of our bubbles on their own.

Farnam Street has a great blog post supporting what you just said:

That most people only express things to people that they thing would be accepting of what they said. Even if they might not agree with it, they'll at least accept that it's okay to hold those opinions.

Once you cross the line into "Expressing this opinion will cause negative social consequences to me" then people start self-censoring.

https://fs.blog/2020/09/spiral-of-silence/

Interesting how it ends with :

> In anonymous environments, the spiral of silence can end up reversing itself, making the most fringe views the loudest.

> Was it in the 80s while gay people were dying of aids while straight people ignored their plight?

Now in 2020s Gay people are accepted in the mainstream society.

> The 70s when mainstream american society treated anti-war activists as terrorists?

Anti-war activists are no longer treated as terrorists.

> The 50s and 60s when white people literally moved out of cities and into suburbs to get away from black people?

Segregation has ended.

All of these positive changes have come by "You surrounded yourself with lots of different people with varying opinions."

If the people were so rigid with their views as assume them to be then these positive changes would have never happened.

They actually largely came about because people protested and demanded to be heard.

Ignoring that your statements are optimistic at best. Some gay people are accepted into mainstream society. Anti-war activists absolutely have recently still been considered terrorists. Hell, anti-RACISM activists are actively being called terrorists by the government right now which goes to the next thing, which is that segregation as a legal concept has ended but turning neighbourhoods white is still absolutely a thing.

It was true for me, individually, my entire life. Yes, a large segment of society have always been closed-minded. That doesn't make being open to new ideas and diverse friendships a bad thing.

At the same time that we are scoffing at the closed-mindedness of the past, in realms like politics, people were _better_ at working together across the aisle at some periods in History. Obviously, not the Civil War era, but for much of the early 20th century, as an example. Just because a lot of people are bad at something does not mean it isn't a laudable goal or practice.

> as people who have been deeply harmed by the systems

Most of the people attacking other people online haven't been deeply harmed by anything at all. They're just parroting what they hear in their online echo chambers. The signal to noise ratio in the discussion of issues that really do affect people is moving to mostly noise. Most of the time it's mountains from molehills, just to virtue signal for attention. Nothing constructive is coming from it. In fact, I'd say it's dividing people more than ever.

Yup, this stuff keeps rising up out of nowhere, and the messages are unnatural to the point that they’re likely engineered.