Communal Fragmentation

2023-07-27

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It feels to me that the Internet is fragmenting at a surprising pace. Twitter, now rebranding to X, is losing more users by the day, as is the traditional Facebook site. Alternatives, at least nominal alternatives, are gaining more and more users: Threads, Bluesky, the invasion of Mastodon, Substack, Rumble, the list is endless. While many alternate services are still owned by major Internet companies, the individual users of separate platforms don't communicate with each other. The result is still a splintering of the global marketplace of ideas. More and more people, beyond simply not wanting to talk to each other, now simply have no opportunity to talk to each other.

I find this so interesting because it reflects how the world largely was before the rise of mass information in the 19th and 20th centuries. Before the telegraph, the radio, the television and the computer, people did not get news from very far away. They tended to stay within their own communities, becoming deeply and intimately familiar with those they communicated with every day. Conversely, they strongly distrusted and looked down on outsiders, preferring dissociation or even persecution.

I don't intend to put any moral value on this phenomenon, but recent events indicate that it's certainly a natural one. It just seems interesting to me that humans, given the ability to freely communicate with anyone from a plurality of backgrounds, circumstances, passions or ideologies, eventually choose to find groups like them and isolate themselves within those groups--just as they always have.

Of course, the biggest difference between then and now is that people are increasingly confining themselves into digital communities, not real ones. Two people can live next door to each other but have no idea who the other is, have completely different social circles, vehemently support two opposing causes, and strongly believe such people as the other are reprehensible. This happens more and more often in real life, leading to the erosion of the local community as people prefer more and more to escape to something virtual.

That prospect worries me more than anything else. No matter how online spaces evolve, the outside world is the one place we will always be part of. I wish we as a society valued that fact more.

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[Last updated: 2023-07-28]