Relentless march of technology

Have you noticed the general trend of massive consolidation and differentiation which is coursing through various facets of society? Consolidation of ideas, beliefs, habits, and thought into simple to understand 2 byte slogans adequately garnished with generous servings of irony, smartassery, and vitriol; into bigger and bigger groups of people with more and more homogenized thinking, behavior, and belief system. Differentiation between these vast groups of people is now more severe than when these groups were smaller. There is an ever decreasing gray area where people can have a complex world view and still be seen as reasonable by the majority. This phenomenon can be witnessed most easily on online forums such as Reddit where a truly large number of people participate in debates on all kinds of issues. But while it seemed to me that such a free flow of ideas must lead to a diverse and fruitful exchange what I find is often exactly the opposite. Discussions which once appeared to me to be fresh with their irreverent bent now just seem bland and repetitive. The irony which once appeared inspired has aged very badly. But that's the biggest irony with irony. You can only stand so much of it. What is true of Reddit is also true of other large gatherings of 'similar' minded people. Such gathering inevitably drown away dissenting voices and contrarian ideas and this has, of course, always been true. What is different now is that aided by the internet these groups of 'similar minded people' have become larger than ever resulting in massive splits of thought, large armies of more or less irrationally driven individuals who are less and less unsure of their positions. Why do I think of them as irrational. Well that must obviously be true in  a world which is clearly colored in shades of grey. Anyone too sure of himself must, therefore, be irrational. This irrationality is the price we pay for trying to belong to something larger than ourselves and there exist good reasons why we find ourselves so ready to pay that price, over and over again. However the repercussions of this simple human predilection appears to become nastier by the day as technology brings us all closer together than ever before. It's easier than ever to cling into bigger and bigger lumps and it's also easier than ever to influence those who would have been too far removed from us just 10 years ago. And as we become aware of others whose ideas appear to threaten ours, especially in the knee jerk kind of way that the relentless march of technology supports with its 140 characters and 10 second sound bytes, I feel we find it natural to wither away into our shells, in the refuge of those who agree with us. And the process of consolidation is thus reinforced.

It would be hard to argue against the benefits of technology even though the benefits are often trumpeted in those same black and white, simple to digest tones which I mentioned before. However, in this one respect technology, at least to me, has been a bit of an unmitigated disaster. It has made our societies homogenized on bigger scales than ever before and also divided it across longer faults than ever before. At the same time I must say that this is a very natural course of events. Perhaps even inevitable.