The Internet and Social Fragmentation

The Internet and Social Fragmentation

The existence of the internet may not be news in most places, nor that it does things astonishing to those alive before the net and boring to those who came after. But I wonder whether the net might have underlying consequences perhaps not well understood.

In particular, I wonder how to measure the influence of the internet in Battambang, Bali, Bukittinggi, or Tierra del Fuego. Or in small towns in Mexico, such as Jocotepec, down the road from me.
Fifty years ago, such places existed in near-perfect isolation from the world at large. Nobody, bright or otherwise, had much chance of learning much of anything. There was AM radio with a limited selection of music and governmentally controlled news. There might be a small library. If you lived near a big city, Guadalajara, in Mexico or Bogota in Colombia, there were good bookstores but books cost money. It was de facto intellectual imprisonment in an empty world.

The, ker-whoom, the internet. A kid in Aranyaprathet, Salta in Argentina near the Bolivian border, or a girl in Joco had virtually the same intellectual and cultural resources as people in Leipzig or Boston. This is nuts.

I am persuaded that it is also impossible, but since the internet is everywhere I may have to modify my views.

My question is: How much and what effect has this had without being quite noticed? Here in Mexico I watched my stepdaughter Natalia growing up from about ten. She was a bright kid. Bright kids litter the earth. Millions of metric tons of them have the internet.

Some things were predictable. Kids like music. Nata began spending long hours conectada, connected—plugged into earphones. So did her friends. Those earphones plugged into the entire earth.

One day she said that she had discovered a wonderful new form of music. What, I asked? “Se llama country.”  Ye gods and little catfish, I thought. Boxcar Willie had come to central Mexico. Soon she knew more about country music than I did, followed by an interest in blues, bluegrass, jazz, –in short pretty much every form of music that existed.

You might ask reasonably, “So what?” To American kids, yes: So what? But to kids in remote towns in the “third world”—whatever that means—it was a huge jump in cultural sophistication. They listened to bands in South Korea, Japan, all over Latin America.
Then of course came Kindle for books, giving Natalia (and the whole earth) the Library of Congress in a two–pound box and, of course, millions of books in lots of languages. Further, the net allowed easy access to news the that governments didn’t want people to have, and the social media allowed people unhappy with things to realize that lots of other people were also unhappy.
Presumably people were doing the same in Vientiane, Taijung, Yellow Knife, and Lost Hope, North Dakota. It was crazy. It still is. We just don’t notice it. What, if any, practical effect does this have?

Granted, some consequences  of the net were not so salubrious. Today there is a karaoke app that lets people on different continents sing together horribly.

Movies became equally available, junk movies ad Fellini and Kubrick and weird cult stuff nobody has ever heard of. Netflix, YouTube, pirated CDs put on-line. Larceny being a major component of adolescence, kids quickly learn to steal software, to use proxy servers (burlando los servidores, spoofing the servers) .Opera? I told Violeta that I’d like to hear the Habanera, whereupon she pulled up five versions that she liked–Callas, Carmen Monarcha and so on and one, so help me by the Muppets. On demand, streaming, good sound, no commercials.

Somewhat parenthetically, the universities in poor countries profit mightily from the net. In nations without much money, America’s ninety-dollar textbooks are out of reach. But when students have iPads, now expected at least hereabouts, a great deal of necessary reading is on-line.

And so I find bright kids, and the young adults they are turning into, far more sophisticated than I was at their age. In remote villages. What consequences does this have?

What about the effects of the net on the US? People in Casper now have access to most of the cultural and intellectual advantages of Manhattan of course, but what are the political effects?
Whether America has ever had freedom of speech or a free press can be debated. Until roughly the Sixties, free expression was limited by a combination of national consensus, governmental censorship, cooperative media, and lack of lateral communication. In the Fifties, television meant ABC, CBS, and NBC which, then as now, were almost federal departments. Communism was the hated enemy and nobody with any circulation questioned this. HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee punished dissent. Access to information that the government didn’t like barely existed. Minor socialist papers existed in New York, but people in Farmville,, Virginia had no access to them. Any sort of sexual content was quashed.

Crucially, there was no lateral communication: You could write letters to editors—vertical communication—which would be censored according to the editors’ whims. That was it.
The aggregate effect was a manufactured unanimity, or the appearance of one. In the post-war prosperity, Americans bought washing machines and tract houses and were content. Television was wholesome, sterile, and not very informative. Superman jumped out of window to promote truth, justice, and the American way, then thought to be related.

Came the internet. Fairly suddenly, every point of view became available to everybody: The KKK, the Black Panthers, communists, fascists, feminists, loon left and loon right, the-earth-is-flatters. The social media and comment sections allowed lateral communication with a vengeance.

A consequence was that the major media became known for what they were, propaganda organs of those who ran the country. Stories that the fossil media would have liked to ignore flew instantly to hundreds of thousands of inboxes, appeared on countless blogs and websites—often with cell-cam video.
What effect, if any, has the net had on sexual mores? When children of nine years can watch pore-level porn of any imaginable type, what happens?

A related question is whether any code of sexual morality can be enforced by a society with internet pornography. Almost all civilized societies in almost all times have imposed restrictions of some sort. Often these have been of religious provenance, and religion is fast being squeezed out of Western societies.

Another question is whether the internet causes, or merely reports, the current fragmentation of the public into warring groups. Today the country seethes with hatreds that were unknown in 1955—perhaps existent, but unknown. Without the Salons and Breitbarts, would their respective readerships even know of each other’s existence? Would misandrist feminism have the enormous traction it enjoys if CalBerkeley could not communicate easily with Boston U? Would all the deeply angry people of today have same political clout if the net had not allowed them to learn of each other and coalesce?

In a country with a fairly homogeneous society, the net may be less politically potent. If there is only one race and one religion, you don’t have racial and religious antipathies. But America is heterogeneous. When the internet forces very different regions—Massachusetts, Alabama, and West Virginia—into digital propinquity, does this arouse hostilities? When widely distributed members of fringe groups the governments don’t like can congregate on websites and in the social media, does this encourage fragmentation?
I dunno. You tell me. 

Fred, a keyboard mercenary with a disorganized past, has worked on staff for Army Times, The Washingtonian, Soldier of Fortune, Federal Computer Week, and The Washington Times. http://fredoneverything.org