The family is a weak institution compared to the popular culture industry. Parents may have limited success, but the institutional power of the entertainment industry and of the internet more broadly ensure that any success is, at best, temporary…
The new communications technologies have created the conditions that require a short form of discourse in which exchange is rapid, facile, unnuanced, impersonal, titillating, and mostly anonymous, with little or no accountability to truth, nuance, and subtlety–a form that very easily allows communication to take on a life of its own…
In sum, while these technologies don’t cause polarization, they do intensify it. Local, face-to-face discourse is in every way the opposite of this mode of civic exchange. It is a long, difficult, processual, and intensely interpersonal form of public discourse that requires attentiveness, nuance, and accountability…
There is no end to good intentions among ordinary citizens, but good intentions are no match for the kind of institutional power wielded by Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and their kind. Precisely because of their institutional setting and power, these shallower forms of public discourse mediated through the new communications technologies invariably seep into the ways in which we think and speak in everyday life. Seepage is everywhere in its form and in its effects. Both the technology and its cultural logics seep into interpersonal discourse and local organizations. In their wake, we see not only exaggerated forms of disagreement spilling into personal life and local organizations but anger, bitterness, and animosity.
James Davison Hunter, Democracy and Solidarity, 300-301.