This is only my experience, but personally I haven’t really found anyone who fits this “politically fractured and agitated” description in the real world.
People in person don’t really seem to care as much and are generally somewhat moderate/centrist and are perfectly capable of talking about these issues without reflexively hating the opposition.
The one thing everyone does seem to agree on is that they hate internet mobs and political extremism on both sides.
I don’t know. Regular people still seem pretty damn reasonable to me. I think the problem might be that we’re taking a very narrowly defined demographic (people who argue rudely with strangers on the internet) and extrapolating from that as if their sentiment represents everyone at large.
Media sources do this as a justification to report on population sentiment and create big narratives arcs out of it. Twitter and Facebook’s scale and visibility makes it very convenient for them.
But I really think the “write nasty comments on the internet” demo is too narrow and specific to extrapolate anything meaningful from it at all (unless perhaps you’re a psychiatric researcher...)
People in person don’t really seem to care as much and are generally somewhat moderate/centrist and are perfectly capable of talking about these issues without reflexively hating the opposition.
The one thing everyone does seem to agree on is that they hate internet mobs and political extremism on both sides.
I don’t know. Regular people still seem pretty damn reasonable to me. I think the problem might be that we’re taking a very narrowly defined demographic (people who argue rudely with strangers on the internet) and extrapolating from that as if their sentiment represents everyone at large.
Media sources do this as a justification to report on population sentiment and create big narratives arcs out of it. Twitter and Facebook’s scale and visibility makes it very convenient for them.
But I really think the “write nasty comments on the internet” demo is too narrow and specific to extrapolate anything meaningful from it at all (unless perhaps you’re a psychiatric researcher...)