Why The Internet Divided Us And Why It Will Save Us
The reason we find so much division on the internet comes down to one word. It is also why it will end up uniting us for a better future.
Vast volumes have been, and will be written, about all the divisions of society caused by the one technology so many thought would unite humanity. The internet. It gets all the blame for enabling social media, dopamine addiction, terrible advertising (that’s true) and well, so much more. But should we be blaming the technology?
The internet didn’t divide humanity. Social media didn’t create dopamine addictions and the desperate desire for a digital detox. Nor did it create trolls, cyberbullies and those most annoying digital creatures of all, influencers.
Humans did. Enabled by culture, which has been around for well, a few hundred thousand years in various forms and degrees. All technologies, ever since the stone tools our human predecessors created and we inherited and evolved, have been imagined by humans.
First I will look at culture and the role it plays. This to understand how we got to where we are. Then I will look at how these technologies will also save us. It may seem dark right now, but we’ve been here before in our history. The future is brighter.
The Role of Culture and Technology
We can bring the divisiveness we’re experiencing via the internet down to one word; culture.
I’ve written before on how how humans use culture as our methodology, our Operating System (OS) if you’re more technologically minded, in order to survive. Biological evolution plays a key role in human evolution, always will, but it just isn’t fast enough. Especially when it was very cold during the ice age and we’d not yet invented central heating. There was no app for that. So, we imagined culture through socializing. I’m drastically shortening human evolution here.
Suffice to say, that humans’ use of culture, is critical to our very survival on this rather hostile, wobbly, muddy and watery planet. And technology is our sidekick. Our very best of friends, more than a dog. For good and bad. It just is. No technology, no humans. Simple as that.
So what it comes down to is, how we use technology, individually and societally via culture. Our individual use is very often influenced by several aspects of culture such as norms, traditions and customs. We’ve done very good things with it, such as creating air-fryers and instapots. And very bad things, like war. And influencers.
How, when, where and why a technology spreads and is shaped comes down to culture. And culture isn’t just literature, music and Taylor Swift. Culture includes economic and political systems, societal governance, architecture, fashion, family systems and so on, what we call, at a macro level, sociocultural systems. It’s all those things that come together that enable us to work as social groups. Just as humans can’t survive without technology, so we couldn’t evolve as a species without cooperating.
But until very, very recently in human history, our societies and cultures had a lot of land and sometimes oceans and deserts between them. Ideas and the technologies that came with them, could take hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years to spread.
A law, perhaps, of technological evolution is that it always speeds our sociocultural systems up. Until here we are today. The internet and now of course, Artificial Intelligence. Funny we call it that. It is artificial, non-biological and we haven’t a clue what intelligence actually is. I digress. The internet.
Why Has The Internet Caused Global Divisions?
Well, the internet itself hasn’t. It’s just a bunch of very, very long wires, cables and slivers of glass, boxes with blinking lights, whirring fans and little rectangles in our hands. Humans need to move information as part of our survival. It’s part of the reason we have these rather complex things on top of our shoulders wrapped up in bone called brains. They process and create a lot of information.
The technologies that enable the internet collapsed the time and space barriers that had long played a role in giving various societies time to decide how and if they wanted to adopt technologies from other societies.
Sometimes we’d think these new ideas from certain technologies were quite handy and we’d adopt them, make a few changes that suited our own culture and move on. More often than not, these technologies moved around the world via trade. Sometimes, we’d have a proper fight about it all and do rather nasty things to one another. Despite all this warring stuff, humans do it seems, prefer to get along. Advances in archeology and anthropology increasingly indicate we have preferred trade over conflict going back many thousands of years.
For a long time, ideas and the technologies they rode upon, could only spread as fast as transportation technologies would allow them to. Canoes, the oar powered ships, sail boats, steam engines, aeroplanes. But transportation technologies have peaked. Perhaps with the concord and seriously, launching a rocket into suborbital space in New York to plonk down in Tokyo is not cheap. Sending along an idea and sharing a cup of tea between New York and Toronto is very cheap via the internet. If not tiring for whoever’s on the early morning end of the time zone thing.
So Why The Divisiveness?
Time. Space. Culture. One of the most important ways humans came to work together is through story telling. When we meet new people and groups of people, we tell stories to each other. Stories help us to understand one another. To find commonalities. To share our realities. It’s part of the reason that we read fiction books, listen to music and watch movies and shows. We started telling stories around campfires a few hundred thousand years ago and we never stopped. It worked.
Now, a few billion of us tell stories every day, but instead of around campfires, we now tell them around screens. Sometimes in just a few seconds and sometimes through hours of videos. In so many ways and forms. It is, quite simply, absolutely wonderful.
It is also challenging. Humanity is made up of so many cultures and societies. Thousands of languages, different ways of writing, norms, traditions, political and economic systems, religious beliefs and non-religious beliefs, yet belief systems all the same. Genders, sexualities, sizes, colours and shapes.
So when you connect all these, when suddenly we can see, here and feel almost instantaneously different cultures around the world, it means stories are told. It means we have less time to think about what we’ve seen and heard. Space is taken out of the equation.
When something new comes into our lives, an idea, a technology, a person, that we don’t understand, that we have no prior knowledge of, our tendency is to assess that newness. Is it a threat? Is it an opportunity? Fight or flight.
What informs our responses is very much the sociocultural system and physical environment in which we grew up. Our economic status, our education, cultural norms, traditions, beliefs and customs. All of these combine to result in how we react.
We should not fault the many minds that collaborated and worked to create what the internet and world wide web (now synonymous) started out as. It was and remains, one of the best things to happen to humanity. It was and is, needed.
Never in our history have we been so interconnected, able to see one another’s cultures and societies in such detail. To share stories like we can today. This is quite profound. We should not be surprised that things got a bit messy.
The Future of the Internet is the Future of Humanity United
Today, in 2023, it may seem rather dark and foreboding. We know the downsides of social media in its present form. There is rampant dis/misinformation and there are horrible conflicts raging, fed by this state of information nightmares.
Agriculture took a few thousand years to spread around the world. Transportation technologies were limited to carry its ideas. The printing press enabled, with the aid of sail ships, ideas to spread a little faster, but even then it was messy. Revolutions in transportation and communication technologies have always resulted in conflicts. Sometimes global ones.
But inevitably, humanity has moved forward. Progressed. We are, despite it not seeming so, living in a time of longer lifespans, less global conflicts. But ideas are clashing. Cultural wars say some. I don’t think these are culture wars so much as a natural rumble of ideas. Cultures clashing much the same as tectonic plates causing earthquakes.
Eventually such collisions stop and things settle. We rebuild. We evolve. We do this through our sociocultural systems. We fix the pressure points, leaks and feedback loops. We do this by experimenting in how we govern ourselves and our societies.
Economic and political systems, literature, music, customs, norms and traditions, all will undergo changes and upheavals.
While it is hard to predict, perhaps impossible, we will survive this time, as a species. We will tell stories in new ways. While it may seem that the internet has divided us, in the long run, we may well find that it is what united us. It won’t be a utopia, that is foolish to imagine. We are after all, human. But through it all, we will discover that there really is more that unites us than divides us.