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Hey Bill! I have a question pertaining to an issue in the U.S. and it's one that we're all get sick of hearing.
Do you think social media - and perhaps the internet in general - has played a role in helping divide this country?

Instead of expanding knowledge and obtaining greater understandings of the world, many people seem to use it to

1) seek and spread information - including false information - confirming their existing biases and beliefs, and
2) converse and interact only with others who share their worldview

(these are things I'm guilty of doing myself)

Follow up q: What steps should we take to help bridge this social, cultural, economic, educational and regional divide?

This is a great question. I felt sure that allowing anyone to publish information and making it easy to find would enhance democracy and the overall quality of political debate. However the partitioning you talk about which started on cable TV and might be even stronger in the digital world is a concern. We all need to think about how to avoid this problem. It would seem strange to have to force people to look at ideas they disagree with so that probably isn't the solution. We don't want to get to where American politics partitions people into isolated groups. I am interested in anyones suggestion on how we avoid this.

In a series of experiments reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2007, Harvard psychologist Michael Norton and two colleagues found that, contrary to our instincts, the more we learn about someone else, the more we tend to dislike that person. “Although people believe that knowing leads to liking,” the researchers wrote, “knowing more means liking less.” Worse yet, they found evidence of “dissimilarity cascades.” As we get additional information about others, we place greater stress on the ways those people differ from us than on the ways they resemble us, and this inclination to emphasize dissimilarities over similarities strengthens as the amount of information accumulates. On average, we like strangers best when we know the least about them.

GORDON wrote: This study says social media makes people hate each other.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2017/0 ... story.html

GORDON wrote:[
He tells us that the creation of facebook directly caused the downfall of human civilization in 2035 due to so many morons suddenly being given the power of perfect communication.

GORDON wrote: Social media, as it currently exists, will be the end of this civilization. Trump 2020.

I’m reminded of that video where someone gives a machine gun to a monkey. The monkey can defiantly operate it but absolutely should not because there’s just such a fundamental lack of understanding of the consequences. That’s a harsh comparison to uneducated humans but I’ll stand behind it because the powers that be work so damn hard at keeping the masses ignorant that I can’t see humanity ever reaching a point of enlightenment whereby we stop killing each other over monumentally stupid shit at the whims of the ruling class.

Thirty years ago barely making it out of grade school and living a nowhere life made someone a loser. Give that same person a little tv they carry with them everywhere that whispers directly to the lizard brain and you turn them into a weapon.

GORDON wrote:

Thirty years ago barely making it out of grade school and living a nowhere life made someone a loser. Give that same person a little tv they carry with them everywhere that whispers directly to the lizard brain and you turn them into a weapon.

GORDON wrote:

Thirty years ago barely making it out of grade school and living a nowhere life made someone a loser. Give that same person a little tv they carry with them everywhere that whispers directly to the lizard brain and you turn them into a weapon.

GORDON wrote:

Thirty years ago barely making it out of grade school and living a nowhere life made someone a loser. Give that same person a little tv they carry with them everywhere that whispers directly to the lizard brain and you turn them into a weapon.