Reflecting on yesterday’s post, I couldn’t help but think: Was America ever any different?
Perhaps this point in our history is not so unique as we might think. Maybe the only real difference is the advent of social media, and its ability to disseminate information immediately to large groups of people. More specifically, its algorithm’s ability to disseminate information immediately to large groups of LIKE-MINDED people.
The algorithm cares not whether the information is accurate, its only goal to excite the reader, to keep them engaged. If the reader is undiscerning, and they have no yardstick by which to measure its veracity, they’re left to go with to go with “what feels right.” Of course, this is a well-documented trap that humans have a blind eye to (see “Confirmation Bias.”)
My point here is this: perhaps we’ve always been this divided – it just took social media to turn a brush fire into an apocalypse.