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1:23

(In »Everything is religion«)

Whereas previously one could be in at least reasonable agreement concerning certain basic facts and then argue about how to interpret these, nowadays it is quite possible for various groups to maintain exclusive sets of facts that are determined by, and tally well with, their own fixed faith. The reason is that most people, if it were up to them, would prefer to be embraced by, and to associate in confidence with, the people they agree with rather than to be contradicted and questioned. And this they may well do. What enables this development towards an escalating social polarisation, both politically and in terms of outlook on life, is that on the Internet one tends to choose the sources of information that say exactly what one wants to hear and which confirm one’s own world view. And this occurs while one effectively isolates oneself from those with divergent opinions, with whom one quite simply refrains from engaging in debate, and with whom a meaningful conversation in principle is always impossible, since one does not even agree on the basics and game rules. Thus, the Internet has not developed into one big global village where everyone communicates with everyone else in a way that reflects mutual understanding and trust – which many digital pioneers naively had hoped it would. Instead, the landscape that emerges on the Web is an all too vast archipelago of closed communities without fixed connections between them.