> These days you have carry an entire encyclopedia with you in order to back up every last thing you say and if you utter anything that isn't deemed 100% perfect by those listening, the social scorn will fall upon you.
This is an immense impediment to writing for the academically-inclined, or merely one who still has some shred of epistemic integrity left, and a huge boon to the dogmatic mob of believers eager to strike down anyone who dares question their orthodoxy. For one, it takes time and substantial research to compose a thought that is both "true" and unique, buttressed by citations to other works or accepted facts; for the other, it is much easier to reply with a five-second thought in 280 characters with thought-terminating cliches branding the "other" as a deplorable undesirable whose ideas aren't worthy of an audience or a platform. That is, if you even get that far - these days it's more likely you will simply be downvoted into oblivion, your thoughts swiftly evicted into the memory hole, never to be seen again.
> Once you've felt said social scorn enough you no longer see words as a way to make friends, so turning to beauty is the natural progression.
Issues of "Redditization" and scorn aside, we are progressing into a post-literate society where the written word and other literary media are being eclipsed by audiovisual media such as YouTube or Instagram. While much of the western world is "literate," in that they understand how to read and write (basic) words and phrases, much of our life - especially online - takes place in a highly visual world of filtered photos and staged videos. It becomes increasingly difficult for one to represent themselves in a written, literary form, when the culture demands "pictures, or it didn't happen."
McLuhan in "Understanding Media" has written on how the preference of one sense over another (e.g. sight over sound) in differing societies has profound cultural impacts over the ways we think, act, and what we find permissible:
The printed form has quite different im-
plications in Moscow from what it has in Washington. So with the
telephone. The Russians' love of this instrument, so congenial to
their oral traditions, is owing to the rich nonvisual involvement it
affords. The Russian uses the telephone for the sort of effects we
associate with the eager conversation of the lapel-gripper whose
face is twelve inches away.
Both telephone and teleprinter as amplifications of the un-
conscious cultural bias of Moscow, on one hand, and of Washing-
ton, on the other, are invitations to monstrous misunderstandings.
The Russian bugs rooms and spies by ear, finding this quite natural.
He is outraged by our visual spying, however, finding this quite
unnatural.