> I reckon that even at its height the type of people likely to be labeled conspiracy theorists and white supremacists were more common offline than online.
My ~50 years of life experience leads me to suspect the exact opposite.
New fancy soapboxes have distorted our understanding of each other, deeply. They amplify, magnify, and otherwise inflate the sense that fringe ideas are more widely represented.
Agreed. It was hard seeing a professor whom I admired slowly transform over the course of the last ten years into a conspiracy theorist and alt-right content propagandist. He used to reliably offer the on-the-other-hand perspective, but knew what he was doing and generally kept a level head. Once his “devil’s advocacy” started getting him attention and likes on social media, it started to be more and more his focus until the persona became the person.
Very sad to see. He has fewer friends among his students and colleagues but a cadre of online followers gathered from who-knows-where.
> My ~50 years of life experience leads me to suspect the exact opposite.
Duration/number of datapoints is less important than sampling. What is your sampling?
My own sampling is from talking to people next to me on trains around south east England. This is obviously not a completely random distribution, but it's much more representative than my friends, family, colleagues and online acquaintances.
My sampling is diverse and big, in my bad opinion.
I'm in the US, born in New England, and have lived in five states throughout the Northeast, Texas, and the Northwest. I've spent a collective three years living in Germany, Switzerland, France (wife is from France). I have slept at least one night in every state in the continental US. I once hitchhiked across the US and back again, gabbing with every person I could find along the way. I lived in cities for about a collective decade, and in very, very rural settings (log cabin even) for a collective decade and a half. Lots of other stuff in between and on the sides. I communicate with diverse groups, in person and online, from right to left, nix to ms, fantasy to sci-fi, young to old. I'm a 'perspectivist', and am fascinated with the perspectives of others, especially those outside of my frame of comfort and reference. I try to push beyond 'convictions', to uncover 'opinions'; convictions are usually firmly rooted, while opinions often change. A person's background and influences are usually baked into their convictions, while opinions generally reflect where a person is in life, like the kind of music 'you're into right now'.
I was a line cook and an artist, working horrible minimum wage jobs for a decade, was homeless for a year (under a bridge homeless), started at community college, transferred to Harvard, graduated at the top, got prestigious fellowships, and now work in software development and live in a rural area that is within an hour of a big city. I still talk to everyone like they are my partner in life, I don't care what they look like or with which demographic they 'identify', or how long I have known them. I'm gabby - I talk to everyone - I make friends with everyone I meet, from the guy on the street to the gal at the grocery store, to the company leader.
Confession: I'm a thinker and writer in my free time. But I have tried to cast as wide a net in life, and have tried to engage people as people, for what I think is a long time.
My conclusion: we're being gamed. The people underneath are intact. Amazingly, when the game is lifted, the people emerge, largely unscathed, as testament to the endurance capability of our ancestral rodentia.
My sample and data have led me to hold this opinion rather strongly, for what it is worth, which is nothing.
My ~50 years of life experience leads me to suspect the exact opposite.
New fancy soapboxes have distorted our understanding of each other, deeply. They amplify, magnify, and otherwise inflate the sense that fringe ideas are more widely represented.