"Why Have We Soured on the 'Devil’s Advocate'?" by Nitsuh Abebe https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/03/magazine/why-have-we-soured-on-the-devils-advocate.html
This is a good piece on why it's so hard to have reasoned debates online.
@nolan great read; relevant to an article I tooted about this morning that you might find interesting too (https://mosaicscience.com/story/why-good-people-turn-bad-online-science-trolls-abuse/)!
@forty8bits I read that earlier this week. Good read 🙂
@nolan I thought this was quite succinct: "They turned all speech into public pronouncements, and thus all conversation into a strange form of activism, part of a zero-sum battle over which ideas will find a foothold in our collective attention."
I believe the most lasting consequence of social media is the trend towards "speech as performance". Whether it's your hobby or a conversation with a stranger, there's an audience to please and a personal brand to build.
I think this goes back to the concept of "context collapse": http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2013/12/08/coining-context-collapse.html
If I know someone in real life, I have some motivation to understand their POV and maybe even challenge my own. Online, it's often more expedient to just assume everyone is a troll and thus ignore them. Sometimes this assumption isn't even wrong.
The kind of debate I may be willing to have with my uncle at Thanksgiving is totally different from the kind of debate I want to have with a rando on the Internet.