Quote:
Originally Posted by PsYcNeT
Kind of a tangent, but there is a really good point in here.
Has the internet caused us to have more extreme opinions, and therefore defend them so vehemently against others?
Is this the reason civil discourse has fallen by the wayside?
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It does make you wonder if the relative anonymity of the internet is actually the poison that has killed civility. I don't know if we can claim that discourse was always "civil" in the old days, but I seem to remember having a ton of heated political discussions with people that I still consider friends, and when you're face to face you really can never say "you just believe that because you're a ######bag." You are sort of forced to come to terms with the other person's opinion and at least understand it, even if you can't necessarily agree.
On a discussion board, you're not forced to do any such thing. You can simply fall back on mocking other viewpoints, or flaming people who hold them--and you can demonize "the other side" to your heart's content.
I don't know--I wonder if Gozer has a really good point here. Not that we're all discussing things on message boards, but that because the internet is so vast, we can limit our "genuine" interactions to people who already agree with us. And in that sense, we can create the false impression that only one view is worth discussing, and anything else is just totally beyond the pale.
I hope that's not the direction we're going, but I do feel like the political discourse in the U.S. has become more hostile over the past 10 years--on both sides.