The root cause of America’s radicalization and polarization problem

submitted by BioEssentialism from self.TumblrInAction

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[–]Alienhunter糞大名 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

Is it a new phenomenon or simply an existing one that has been exasperated by social media? Personally I think the root causes have been endemic to American society for a very long time since WWII at least probably even earlier than that back to the days of the civil war. In fact we may be looking at what is essentially a basic kind of trait that is prevalent in every society, tribalism.

I think social media just changes the rules of socialization and is rife for abuse, but social media alone isn't the issue so much as it's the current algorithm controlled content feeds play off the base human emotions and have found that fanning negative emotion and conflict leads to far more engagement and money. Essentially it's encouraging a mob mentality and polite society hasn't yet evolved enough to come up with good ways to deal with it since it's a pretty new phenomenon and the traditional social mores aren't working to contain it.

In the past if someone wronged you, you would have to either confront them to their face or convince their friends and family to intervene. So if it was simply a petty complain or annoyance you'd be viewed upon unfavorably for airing your dirty laundry for the world to see. Now these days you are still viewed unfavorably for doing such but can find enough random people online to back you up that even if you have a super minority opinion you'll fell justified in holding it and think everybody is behind you. And the algorithms now have learned that spreading this to the most people maximizes their profits.

Essentially it's like if you invited a rumor monger into your home or group and paid them to tell you all the juicy gossip. In the past and even today rumor mongers are viewed upon unfavorably and have destroyed people's lives before with careless rumors, but now the scuttlebutt is worldwide and the reach of such rumors is far beyond a bunch of women chatting at the well.

Ultimately the best thing we as society can do is discourage people from using social media as much as possible and bring back in person socialization at the community level as much as possible.

Society works best when people are organized, first along their family lines, then with their immidiate neighbors and community members. Social media tends to focus on larger issues that effect the whole country but often don't matter so much on the local scale. Even if your politics differ you'll likely have a lot in common with many of your neighbors and find common ground on many things that are relevant to your local community. What needs to be done then is people need to abandon this corporate form of socialization we are given and instead work to build real interpersonal relationships with those whom they share their closest ties with, blood and earth.

[–]BioEssentialism[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

In fact we may be looking at what is essentially a basic kind of trait that is prevalent in every society, tribalism.

If this is in fact true why haven’t we seen other countries such as Asian ones get radicalized in either direction?

[–]Alienhunter糞大名 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

A few reasons I think. One is that the vast majority of internet content is in English so there's simply less to be bombarded with.

Other reasons are cultural, Asian countries tending to be more homogeneous and still holding onto stronger family and local ties than the west, their societies are older than the west and have less transplants , though with modern Urbanization this is slowly becoming more like the west. There also tends to be a lot of social stigma towards acting out in public still which is far different than the west.

I think other reasons come down to technological barriers towards the use of Asian languages in computers slowed down public adoption of a lot of technology or at least forced it down different paths. The data requirements needed to encode Chinese characters for example are far more robust than alphanumeric and early computers were very unwieldy for the average person.

Finally I think that the political situations themselves are vastly different. If you can read Asian languages well you can go online and see many of the same kind of toxic twitter threads you'll see anywhere, oftentimes they are far more inflammatory than what you'll see in English. But this is because most people don't take them very seriously.

China has very tight controls on all internet use and will shut down anything it thinks is going to cause an uproar. Other countries tend to have more freedom of speech but conditions are generally as such that most young people don't get involved in politics.

I think the kind of extreme twitter polarization that you get in the US is largely a factor of the US bi-partisan political machine which is a fairly unique configuration amongst the world's countries. This spreads into other countries I think via the ubiquitous nature of English and the US population totally dominating the Anglosphere. Even if you combine all the populations of Canada Australia and the UK you don't even reach half the US population.

Asia is a different environment politically and socially. Chinese social media certainly has the population for the same factors to really take hold but the Chinese government is easily one of the more censorious in the world so it's more or less impossible for social media trends to take shape without coming under direct scrutiny and facing shutdowns should they proceed in a direction the ruling class wishes to squelch.

The other languages simply lack the population and geographic distribution to really be as relevant as major languages like English or Spanish. Chinese and Hindi are the only Asian languages that come anywhere close. I suppose Arabic should be considered as well but it tends to be mutually unintelligible in different regions and is largely used in the same way Latin was used in Medieval Europe, used by the religious bodies but not the common tongue of the people.

[–]BioEssentialism[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

or Spanish

Except the whole of Latin America hasn’t been nearly as radicalized as America, at least from what I’m aware of.

[–]wylanderuk 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Is it a new phenomenon or simply an existing one that has been exasperated by social media?

Option number two...

I would not discount the toxic effects of feminism over the decades, especially the impact on families.