From a sociological perspective, society is being siloed and fractured/polarized by... the internet. It's a function of being able to choose your own media, all the time. During the Age of Spoken Word, you only heard what there was to hear. For much of the history of empire, this has been stories told by bards, paid by kings. In the modern era, state propaganda and corporate media reigned, and their narratives were the only ones you heard on your radio and in your newspaper.
Bam. The internet. We choose every little story we see. And we choose them largley through social media agreggators: and we choose those too.
Suddenly you're a lot less likely to think like your next door neighbour does. This isn't inherently good or bad, and neither is participating in online communities. But is does have effects, whether left or 'right', and you're right to point them out.
It's harder to disagree now; we're used to only agreeing, or disagreeing over minute differences. This has real, measurable impacts on social trust and societal cohesion.
But probably the biggest impact, that scares me the most: we can't even agree on a basic, shared set of facts right now.
Talking to 5 random people on the street now is now likely to reveal 5 fundamentally different understandings of reality, and epistemology (how we know what to believe). It's hard when half the people think that 5g is aliens who invented corona to put on the facemask blah blah blah.
That's the scary piece to me: siloing in communities has made us extremely vulnerable to having our worldview divorced from material reality. This has, of course, always been true; hence the materialist focus of Marxism.
But I think it's increasing, and I don't know what's gonna stop it. One point of optimism: communtiies like this exist that are materialist and rational, which self-correct beliefs and can actually get people more in tune with reality, even if much of the internet is doing the opposite.
Thanks for the food for thought, comrade, and much love :red-fist: