[spoovy]

This worries me to be honest. The mainstream media was clearly always spinning to us long before the internet came along, but at least when people broadly trusted the same sources they also broadly bought into the same spin, so at least there was agreement within the group and a degree of social cohesion as a result. The BBC and 20th Century Britain springs to mind.

This seems to be breaking down at a rapid rate though, when it's very hard to have any idea where people will stand on hugely important subjects such as climate change, geopolitics etc until you speak to them. People's opinions vary wildly seemingly based mainly on which sources they happen to trust.

[Nasrudith]

I have always maintained that social cohesion isn't a real goal for any but a dictator or manipulator. It has always essentially been manufactured consent in one way or another from when unified battle lines mattered more than pesky things like "the first three ranks of soldiers will almost certainly die", "that mentality will lead to domestic problems and stunt growth" because a rout noe would ensure everyone gets either captured and enslaved, exiled with nothing, or killed. Except it has been centuries since machinegun fire makes "cohesion" a pointless slaughter brought about because they were lead by absolute idiots. And we had plenty of proverbial ones from bad decisions.

It doesn't spare us from mass delusions and disasterous decisions and is in fact a delusion in itself. It lost its few virtues so it is time to toss the once useful lie of a cohesive monoculture onto the ash heap and move on.