It seems to me that any time I am online and get into an argument (or am reading one) in which the people arguing are severely polarized into two sides of an argument, then many times it eventually falls into insults and finally offrails into people personally attacking each other and their views or beliefs.
Do you have an opinion? Does the Internet discourage people having intellectual debate and actually coming to conclusive answers? Do you have any experiences or evidence to back up your claim?
Tbh go to any site like the chans where moderation is lack and everyone treats attacks and insults as par the course completely honest no holds barred intellectual discussion takes place where nothing is sacred, nothing is assumed and everything can be attacked. Since everyone is anonymous and there is no advantage to building up/preserving a reputation/gaining ebin pointsssss the system does not turn into a hugbox and flamewars do not take place because there are no egos (which is why people who try to avatar get shut down by everyone else as quickly as possible). It's pretty good for intellectual discussion especially when it comes to democratizing intellectual debate, so it's not just in the realm of the pretentious and state approved (hence why China, Google and Western politicians spout such bizarre rhetoric that shitposters are shitposter terrorists just as dangerous as cheeky jihad bandits) muggy warts. The one flaw is that it relies on users continually creating new content and new ideas in the free market of ideas, and usually as a certain board kultur grows in popularity the free market of ideas tends to switch away from quality discussion to a watered down, mass marketed parroting should the lowest common denominator ever outnumber the people actually contributing. Then there's shills and spammers, which you don't get in real life. Well, I guess you do get those in real life. But on the internet shills and spammers can really take advantage of groupthink to crush intellectual discussion. Peer pressure is powerful, few people want to be someone who stands out to the crowd, hence why people of political persuasions all flock to their own communities in real life and online. But on the internet this is so easily abused, with one person through many accounts becoming a crowd unto themself to influence the rest, give orders and guide the narrative. Another thing is that with mods, shills, facebook, twitter, youtube and so on able to silence certain narratives by shadow banning, delisting, deleting, doxxing and diluting, on most mainstream sites of discussion the only debate that can take place are within approved boundaries. So you could look for some small community with no gestapo or secret FBI mods where the discussion is good, but usually such places discuss outside approved boundaries on the fringe where the diversity of opinion can be narrower, so you have a place where anyone can say anything but many say little out of the ordinary.
Personally I find that when you have discussions where people are quoting everything from the Bhagavad Gita to the Protocols, from the German Ideology to discourses on Zen and most important of all - quotes from the anonymous, whose arguments were preserved through time for their own sake... I am content.
Otherwise yes it discourages intellectual discussion. The biggest issue is that people want to save face and don't want to be wrong. When you're anonymous this is no concern, but even on bay12 what usually happens is it descends into flamewar or the discussion just ends. That isn't debate, that's endurance.
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Topic: Does the Internet discourage intellectual discussion and debate? (Read 30317 times)