How technology created a global village—and put us at each others throats by Nicholas Carr via The Boston Globe

I don’t know how they get numbers like this, but it’s an interesting figure:

Thanks to the Internet and cellular networks, humanity is more connected than ever. Of the world’s 7 billion people, 6 billion have access to a mobile phone — a billion and a half more, the United Nations reports, than have access to a working toilet.

All of this interconnectivity was supposed to foster tolerance. The more we knew of someone, the more we would like them. Or at least tolerate them. Carr points out that assumption isn’t new. It’s been proclaimed by many western thinkers since the invention of the telegraph—and radio, TV, phone and Internet were only supposed to make it better. And yet, in some ways, they didn’t.

Yet we live in a fractious time, defined not by concord but by conflict. Xenophobia is on the rise. Political and social fissures are widening. From the White House down, public discourse is characterized by vitriol and insult. We probably shouldn’t be surprised

He cites some research done by psychologist in 2007 around people who lived in the same apartment building and they found that:

as people live more closely together, the likelihood that they’ll become friends goes up, but the likelihood that they’ll become enemies goes up even more...The nearer we get to others, the harder it becomes to avoid evidence of their irritating habits. Proximity makes differences stand out.

Social networks seem to only amplify this effect:

Social networks like Facebook and messaging apps like Snapchat encourage constant self-disclosure. Because status is measured quantitatively online, in numbers of followers, friends, and likes, people are rewarded for broadcasting endless details about their lives and thoughts through messages and photographs. To shut up, even briefly, is to disappear. One study found that people share four times as much information about themselves when they converse through computers as when they talk in person.

Work along these lines from British scholars in 2011 concluded:

With the advent of social media it is inevitable that we will end up knowing more about people, and also more likely that we end up disliking them because of it.

That rings true every time you hear someone talk complain about all the racist, hateful, stupid garbage from acquaintances in their Facebook feed. I agree with Carr that, at then end of the day, you’ll never be able to build a global community of harmony with only software.

[there’s an idea], long prevalent in American culture, that technological progress is sufficient to ensure social progress. If we get the engineering right, our better angels will triumph. It’s a pleasant thought, but it’s a fantasy. Progress toward a more amicable world will require not technological magic but concrete, painstaking, and altogether human measures: negotiation and compromise, a renewed emphasis on civics and reasoned debate, a citizenry able to appreciate contrary perspectives. At a personal level, we may need less self-expression and more self-examination.

Love that last line. It’s worth repeating:

we may need less self-expression and more self-examination

Carr concludes:

[technology doesn’t] make us better people. That’s a job we can’t offload on machines.