It feels like our social constructs are not designed to deal with modern technology.<p>Consider how real world communities are organized. In most of the world we have residential districts and commercial districts. Residential districts are meant to be a quiet place of rest/reflection and commercial districts are where people gather to advance our society forward.<p>Big cities are a special mix of commercial/residential but with their own constraints and culture.<p>When a human being walks down the street, visits a restaurant, or goes shopping they aren't inundated with political view points, bad news from everywhere in the world, memes, etc. We as a society have specially allocated spaces for things like this. Maybe it's the city center where people stand around with megaphones preaching something. Or maybe it's a conference where people gather and exchange viewpoints. Or a university where the focus is learning and information exchange.<p>These "social constructs", for lack of a better term (?), took thousands of years to build and optimize. And most of them were built in an age where information took a long time to travel.<p>But today information travels <i>fast</i>. We are all connected more than ever before. Humanity consists of large hive minds that can feed information to each other <i>instantly</i> at any time of day.<p>What I'm wondering is...<p>- What are the long term side effects of an unfiltered, unlimited, and rapid transfer of information from arbitrary sources?<p>- Is the human mind even capable of operating in a global information system. Put another way, hasn't most of human evolution occurred within smaller local ("tribal"?) communities; a scale we can deal with mentally?<p>Every year it feels like more and more of our humanity is being transferred into a virtual space that is no more real than a video game. The connection with close friends and relatives is still there but I feel the connection loosening despite my best efforts. I see this happening to everyone around me, not just myself.<p>It feels like local communities are dying or completely non-existent. We aren't "forced" to deal with each other and so we... don't.<p>Something crucial is missing and I can't quite put my finger on what it is. And I'm worried.<p>Does anyone else feel the same way?
> It feels like local communities are dying or completely non-existent. We aren't "forced" to deal with each other and so we... don't.<p>This is somewhat true, but you can escape it <i>if you want to</i>. It just takes some effort and dealing with people that you normally wouldn't.<p>However, just like advertising has worked out how to maximize our "spend" so also other forces have worked out how to maximize other things they want us to do.<p>As the screeching gets louder and louder you just have to ignore it more and more.<p>I found that absolutely refusing to vote in elections did it for me; my vote is mathematically insignificant and since I won't use it, all the various howling attempts to get me to do so are easily ignored. Probably not for everyone.