It requires more conscious interpretation to speak via the Internet compared to in person. The Internet is a weird museum filled with stuff to interpret.
Ok, seems true, but it's not really a new point. Does it make more sense if I read the other posts? Was there another section at the bottom I missed due to their mobile UI (happens all the time)?
In the west it got its start in religious enquiry (loosely: the Bible is ambiguous, or at least people disagree about interpretation; can we figure out what the real underlying message is and thus correct errors made by humans because obviously the "real" text must be absolutely correct).
In the 20th century this discipline was broadened primarily by Heidigger whose work is famously incomprehensible yet filled with insight along with many others; it also lead to insight (e.g. semiotics) and extreme absurdity (e.g. 99.9% of the deconstructionists, sadly despite their having started with a useful insight).
* and in more modern times, machines. I spent several years in the 1980s working on how it even makes sense to talk about a machine "understanding". It definitely changed how I view the world, but IMHO so far has had essentially no impact on the world itself.
The problem is laypeople expect to be able to understand advanced philosophy without knowing anything about the history that led to this point.
Nobody complains about, e.g., Weinberg's textbook on QFT being unreadable. I think this is primarily because Weinberg is basically unknown to people who haven't had 4+ years of physics education.
You could also start with some of heidegger's shorter works like What is Called Thinking? or the one about technology (I'm not sure what the popular translation of the title is).
I disagree (I've never tried reading him in translation). His German coinage and turgid sentences are legendary. I had one particularly obscurantist sentence from Sein und Zeit on my whiteboard for over a year and it was always a source of discussion, both jocular and serious, when someone came into my office.
This is the kind of phenomenon I miss in remote work
> Perhaps this accounts for the widely-reported sense of unreality that plagues so many of us.
The idea is that interpreting content on the Internet leads people to become more self-conscious about how they interpret reality, which causes it to be less "real."
It looks like Stanford's encyclopedia of philosophy [^1] might have a good introduction on the intersection of truth and hermeneutics. A quick skim of that section appears to fuse together ideas from aesthetics, ethics, and linguistics to build a conception of truth that is not based in traditional positivist epistemology. Again, I am not a philosopher so I don't really know what I am talking about.
[1]: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hermeneutics/#ContHerm_1
Alternately, we seem to have fulfilled his prediction that this would come to pass in 100-200 years, and would erode the ideals held by the Western mindset.
TBC: Not intending this to be read as a fatalism, merely that his concern was less with nihilism itself, and more with its effect on future society and people.