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Comment by dyauspitr | Hacker News Reader

Social media, smart phones, and all of that are heavily responsible for this, but at the same time I think the main crux of the issue, in my opinion, is that we don’t have a common culture anymore. As long as you don’t have a common culture and a common understanding of the basic rules that everyone agrees on, no one can spend time with each other comfortably.

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We absolutely do have a common culture. The fact so many people think we do not is derivative of social media and smartphones.

All but the most extreme far-right and far-left people in the country really do agree on 95%+ of anything with daily relevance to their lives.

For a long time the number 1 song in the USA was "Choosin Texas" by Ella Langley.

I have no idea who that is and I've never heard the song.

Is that the type of "culture" that this statement is referring to?

> As long as you don’t have a common culture and a common understanding of the basic rules that everyone agrees on, no one can spend time with each other comfortably.

Doesn't seem so to me.

> Is that the type of "culture" that this statement is referring to?

Shared music is absolutely part of common culture

That wasn't the question.

"common understanding of the basic rules that everyone agrees on"

I would have thought that storming the Capitol, beating and killing police officers was Not Acceptable, but apparently I was wrong.

There are many such examples. We do not agree on the basic rules any more.

"common understanding of the basic rules"

Vaccines are good.

See, not everyone agrees.

"All but the most extreme far-right and far-left people in the country really do agree on 95%+ of anything with daily relevance to their lives."

Can I get a source for this? Or is this just something you are pulling out of nowhere to argue against someone else's lived experience because it conflicts with yours?

Here's evidence for the effect I'm claiming even among "controversial" topics: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/your_political...

Now consider what fraction of things in a society could possibly be controversial, versus things like: "when a person is hurt, I should try to help them" or "when I owe money, I should pay it back," or "if I find money lying around, I should find the proper owner," or "if I'm taking an exam, I should not cheat on it."

These are beliefs that are nearly unanimous within American culture and not unanimous at all globally. Those are what constitute the core of "our culture." They are by definition nearly invisible to us.

I don’t think the “agreeing middle” is 95% anymore. Maybe this is a Chronically Online POV but it seems the extremes are growing quickly, the center is shrinking, and society is going bimodal.

The center is mostly offline, thinks both extremes are very small portions of the population, and doesn't post on social media. So they seem small but really there are a lot of people like this who aren't shouting into the internet 24/7, so you just remember that what you hear is all the extremists shouting, not the people you saw during the course of a week who weren't.

Society is going bimodal on the 1% of issues that bisect people. Those 1% of issues are consuming 99% of our mass-media airtime.

Talk to your neighbors and you'll find that everyone just cares about decent roads, decent schools, decent jobs, and decent healthcare.

The central part of their identity is to assume that they're the vast majority of people. It allows them not to have to think about stuff too hard - it's all settled, and it's settled on what the people I'm exposed to (i.e. friends, family, and the television) think. I'm safe just repeating that and reporting people who deviate from that.

They don't realize how much the "moral majority" differs in town as opposed to the city, the coasts as opposed to the bulk of the country, in small private liberal arts colleges in the east and at Mormon universities in Utah, or in China, Russia, or Bulgaria as compared to the suburb they grew up in.

If all of those people simply follow the central tendency, and give mass media the same (or greater) weight as they give their neighbors, that guarantees war all the time. It will always be better to listen and try to understand points of view that you aren't familiar with, rather than to hide in the safe (and always untrue depending on the shape of the border you draw) assumption that you represent the vast majority. This, without even considering whether the vast majority are right or wrong.

I mean, some people are so impervious to reality with this that they can lose election after election and believe that they are still 95% of people. Then they start theorizing about mind control and supernatural entities, just to keep from opening their eyes and ears.

Thanks for your reply, I found it to reflect my lived experience far more then the other replies, having moved from very liberal to very conservative places and vice-versa. People are so caught in their little bubbles they don't realize there is an entire world of people out there who think differently then they do.

Nah, pessimizer has no idea what they're talking about.

Grew up as the only liberal or atheist family I knew in an ultra-conservative area, went to school in a liberal area, moved back to a conservative area.

Americans are far, far, far more similar than they are different.

Go travel the world and talk to people from e.g. low-trust societies if you don't believe me.

That 95% number is so far from the truth. Gen Z males are significantly (though not majority) right wing and Gen Z females are the exact opposite. Based on data, 67% of the time, Gen Z males and females do not agree on the same political issues.

You are missing the point.

"Political issues" are by definition things that people disagree on. Saying people "disagree on political issues" is equivalent to saying "people disagree on things they disagree on."

But the vast majority of daily life is not driven by or meaningfully affected by any of these "issues on which people disagree." If you go and talk to your neighbors, even ones who you disagree with on disagreement-creating-topics, you will find you actually agree on nearly everything. The set of things you agree on is called "our culture."

I disagree. These are fundamental viewpoints that affect every aspect of everyday life. The biggest disagreements are in fundamental things like whether to have children, childrearing gender roles, household responsibilities between genders, education about gender issues/LGBTQ etc. These are not some far away issues that don’t affect everyday life. The overall fundamental issue seems to be in regards to gender roles, and that affects every married couple.

The fragmentation of culture is also the fault of social media (and all media to a lesser extent). It's far easier to get sucked in to echo chambers where other opinions are mocked or shut out.

In the past we all got our news from Walter Cronkite.

The homogenization of culture was the fault of traditional centralized media. If you go back before the printing press, there was actually a much greater diversity of cultures and languages. Decentralized (social) media is bringing us back to how traditionally tribal humanity used to be.

I may be incorrectly inferring that you think this is a good thing, but "traditionally tribal humanity" were constantly at war with one another. I'm not sure that's something we want to go back to.

Yes, it was (and some places, sadly continues to be) the ultimate horror that people can visit upon each-other.

Suffering it, over and over and over, was what led humanity down the natural, logical path to becoming civilised and cooperative.

It's the lesson we need to learn well, if our self-appointed badge of Very Intelligent Species is to actually mean anything more than a pointless, neverending game of forming factions and battling other factions.

I’ll take more of that homogenization of culture please.

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