Frank Kogan

on the internet, there is nothing to keep you anywhere close to or patient with the arguments of your foes: nothing to enforce even minimal stabs at understanding

Ah, here's a point where I'm more optimistic than you:

What's happening is that we're far more cosmopolitan and connected than we were fifty-five years ago (let's take the release of Elvis's "That's Alright Mama" as our comparison date, which happens to be the year I was born), so if we choose someone else taken at random, anywhere in the world, we're more likely to know what's up with him and he's more likely to know the same about us. But paradoxically we experience this as greater fragmentation because (1) we've broken up into more "pieces" (i.e., short-term subgroupings), and (2) we are more - not less - in touch with more of the pieces, so (3) we are less - not more - likely to think that someone is either with us or off the radar. But since (4) I and you are more rather than less likely to be pulled by distant and different pieces than we formerly were, and therefore (5) you and I might experience this as our becoming more different from each other, hence more division and less understanding, when in actuality (6) this pulling away makes us each more in range with a larger world, despite the feeling that we are less connected with each other.

So what I'm saying is that we perceive more social "pieces" now than we did in the past, both through internal "fragmenting" and greater awareness of distant pieces, but that we're less not more able to avoid knowing something of what's going in in some other piece. So even if, say, you become less closer to or able to understand Simon Reynolds, and vice versa, nonetheless, through Simon, you are more likely to be closer to and partially understand someone distant that you'd have known zilch about otherwise. And vice versa.

Barring wholesale economic and ecological collapse (which unfortunately isn't out of the question), I see this process as inevitable. Again, it might feel like fragmentation and estrangement, but the actual movement will be towards greater connection to and understanding of the world.