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Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

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Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

#201

Post by roenxi »

vasco wrote: post #143
kulahan wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They probably aren't the friends people are thinking of when referring to things like this. The benefit of friends isn't just that you have someone fun to talk to, it's that you're building out a social support circle. Your discord friends can't come over and help you clean up after a flood, or watch your dogs while you're away on a sudden emergency, or cook you a meal when you're grieving a loss, or help you get an…

Most of those things seem like services rather than friends. I want a friend to talk to, not to cook me food or watch my dog, anyone can do those other things. And talking to a friend many times is as good as a video call. In fact because of the internet I can get conversations and opinions from friends all over the world quite quickly.

You can also talk to someone as a service, if you ever feel that is the weak link in your lifestyle.

Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

#202

Post by Levitz »

phrotoma wrote: post #169
lukebechtel wrote: post #33

I favor the theory that polarization is due to decreasing attention spans, effectively preventing us from appropriately considering nuance. Related: https://open.substack.com/pub/josephheath/p/populism-fast-an...

On top of that, text based communication for short attention spans is both brief and dehumanized, encouraging "dunking" behaviour. Hard to empathize with folks who have differing views when the discourse can broadly be described as "lol got'em!".

Being someone whose friends very clearly lean to one side, while generally not having a developed interest in politics, I really want to push back on this. Unless you intentionally talk to people whose views oppose yours (which won't happen by default, people sort themselves into tribes) real person communication is very prone towards dunking on people who aren't even there or might very well not even exist. Cue polarization.

In my view, if someone is reading text for stuff they disagree on that's already a win. It's better than the default.

Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

#203

Post by roenxi »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #191
lynx97 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my POV, you are pissed that your people lost, and can't get over it. Remember that democracy is a pendulum. Swinging from side to side is a necessary ingredient of democracy. You can't always win, and, you shouldn't. But I guess you are unable to listen to this simple principle, because you and your people railed yourself up so much that you are unable to calm down. That is weird to me, as I believe that is a sk…

Did you ask the question to get a real answer? The difference between right and far right is, in a nutshell, endorsement of insurrection and militarism. The GOP was a right-wing party. MAGA is bona fide far right. There are plenty of conservatives (or pissed-off idiots) who voted for Trump but aren’t MAGA. There are also lots of folks who believe in MAGA to the core. The latter are far right, probably fascists. > dem…

Do the multiple elections contested not count any more? MAGA clearly don't endorse insurrection, their basic strategy to control the government is to win lots of votes and come back to try again a few years later if it doesn't work (they're impressively persistent). Which has involved broadening their support base into low-wage minorities in US society and trying to prise the Black and Hispanic votes away from the Democrats, I note. Might be seeing the fruits of that starting to turn up in the 2024 presidential elections. Or might be a fluke and just Trump's charisma, the Republicans are hard to support.

Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

#204

Post by watwut »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #186
watwut wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are far right, I have to keep secrets from you. For safety. And no, someone actively wanting to limit my freedom and safety because their ideology is that women must be limited cant be trusted. They cant be trusted in calling me on my shit, because what they perceive as shit is my self interest and my core values.

> If you are far right, I have to keep secrets from you. For safety Wide gulf between “people that share the same values and ideas as you” and Nazis.

Nazi share values with quite a lot of people. Nazi adjacent worldview is not as rare as we like to pretend it to be.

But I intentionally picked example that makes it clear that shared values are necessary for that trust. You may have differences on the edges, but it wont work without them.

Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

#205

Post by Levitz »

dmix wrote: post #75
Grikbdl wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can no longer engage in (controversial) debates on other social medias, as responses often indicate a lack of understanding with the other person - they glance over the arguments, make a prejudice-based opinion, and then they respond to their straw man, often loaded with bad emotions. It's quite frustrating and as you say, sadly only solution is to disengage, but in so doing the polarisation only increases as disse…

> but in so doing the polarization only increases as dissenting opinions are removing themselves. It used to make sense when the internet was smaller but now? Not so much. Especially when the people running platforms/media, content moderators and influencers explicitly don't care about the truth. You're not just fighting some dummy posting a comment. The only positive thing I've seen in the last decade to address thi…

Agree, with current dynamics, attempting to "correct" discourse as a user is like attempting to correct law in a society as a citizen. The impact moderation/police have is far too large for the users/citizens to really matter much.

Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

#206

Post by watwut »

lynx97 wrote: post #165
watwut wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are far right, I have to keep secrets from you. For safety. And no, someone actively wanting to limit my freedom and safety because their ideology is that women must be limited cant be trusted. They cant be trusted in calling me on my shit, because what they perceive as shit is my self interest and my core values.

Same for "far left", those can't be trusted either. However, what strikes me as interesting: Do you actually destinguish between right and far right? Because I have a feeling, many people don't. Why do I think that? I recently read on Planet Debian: "Conservatives tend to be criminals". That sentences struck me as the core of the problem. People seem to fail to see the difference between a person with conservative va…

> Do you actually destinguish between right and far right?

Some on the right are far right, some are not. Many people on the right will prefer far right over center and vote accordingly. They just do not like the aesthetic and historical associations.

> Because I have a feeling, many people don't.

That is because right radicalized itself much more then left. And moderate right spend too much time excusing, enabling to and defending far right then by anything else. They loved to pretend far right does not exist, actually, until it turned out they ended up undistinguishable.

> People seem to fail to see the difference between a person with conservative values, and outright "Nazis"

Problem is that "conservative values" is more of an euphemism that sounds good when you want to pretend a group of people have much better motivations then they actually have. That is how it was used for over a decade now. People with conservative values rarely object to far right values, but they straight up hate the center (which they claim to be practically communists).

Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

#207

Post by RajT88 »

somenameforme wrote: post #123
crazygringo wrote: post #15

> "Despite minor differences between individual surveys, the data consistently show that the average number of close friendships rose from 2.2 in 2000 to 4.1 in 2024," says Hofer. If true, this is an astonishing social transformation, because it goes against everything we here about the loneliness epidemic getting worse . Or have people redefined what they consider to be "close friends"? Or are people actually genuin…

The DOI links aren't working so I can't read the study but I think there's a simple explanation, that also belies the headline. It may be that the typical number of close friends is now 0. But as people no longer even have any concept of close friendships, they're considering 'lesser' relationships as close friendships, because it's all they know. This is made even more likely if they didn't define the term and allow…

Feels true. People have a larger number of less-close friends.

Social media has taken over a lot more of young people's social life than it used to. Parents don't want young people to leave the house and play outside, so kids spend the time online. These patterns may persist into adulthood - hard to say.

Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

#208

Post by lithocarpus »

johnny22 wrote: post #52
lithocarpus wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If facebook made it possible to write your own ranking algorithm for what you see, there would be a huge variety of different algorithms you could choose from. 99.9% of end users don't have to write their own they just have to choose whose they want to use - or combine multiple of those available. I think that'd be great, but not for facebook's profits probably.

so how would a user know which one to choose? I already get analysis paralysis as a software dev enough.

Same way people choose what to listen to in other kinds of media most likely.

I am constantly asking people who I admire or respect where they get their news/information from because I'm trying to find better ways since the general media landscape is very dismal.

Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

#209

Post by JadeNB »

VagabundoP wrote: post #180
somenameforme wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The DOI links aren't working so I can't read the study but I think there's a simple explanation, that also belies the headline. It may be that the typical number of close friends is now 0. But as people no longer even have any concept of close friendships, they're considering 'lesser' relationships as close friendships, because it's all they know. This is made even more likely if they didn't define the term and allow…

Yeah I'd like to see a follow up with the depth of friendships compared with pre-social media ones.

How could one compare depth of friendship of even two current friendships, let alone of current friendships with historical ones that are only accessible through people's mutable memories?

Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

#210

Post by Der_Einzige »

crazygringo wrote: post #15

> "Despite minor differences between individual surveys, the data consistently show that the average number of close friendships rose from 2.2 in 2000 to 4.1 in 2024," says Hofer. If true, this is an astonishing social transformation, because it goes against everything we here about the loneliness epidemic getting worse . Or have people redefined what they consider to be "close friends"? Or are people actually genuin…

Most of the “lonlieness” epidemic is really an epidemic of young men not getting laid and not getting married. Simple as.
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