I wonder about how such things occur. If you’ll forgive the tangent, I’ve been reading recently about the Internet, how we find information and how this affects us. There was a reference to a stat stating only 15% of web sites link to opposing viewpoints (stat from roughly 2002). I’ve also been reading books about social networks, marketing etc., all employing the term “tribe.” And what all this reading, and my own online activity on blogs, Facebook, Twitter and so on has me wondering is if we’re all just talking to ourselves. The word “tribe” seems appropriate, more so than the more frequently used “community.” More than ever we are choosing what information we receive. Are we all just “preaching to the choir,” so to speak? Whether it is politics, the environment, the economy or some other issue, it strikes me we’re all just hearing what we want to hear and staying away from anything that might be an opposing view. And this leads to extremism. Is this how such an article as the one you refer to occurs? Or the recent fiasco with the Carleton University Students Association and cystic fibrosis (deciding to drop support claiming the disease only affected white people, primarily men)? Are we all living in little tribal bubbles, so convinced of our own “rightness” that we’ve lost the ability to think critically, unable to even consider opposing views? To think through what we’re saying? What is worrisome here is that these things come out of a younger generation, though the problem is multi-generational. It seems worse than intolerance. It’s the inability to think for ourselves. We join a tribe and just go with whatever the tribe says. In fact, agreement pulls us deeper into the tribe. We also seem unable to make an argument for whatever our position might be because we frame issues in extremes. Perhaps the author here had a legitimate point yet who, but those who already agree with him/her, would hear the point when it’s presented in such an extreme and offensive way? By the way, the book I’ve been reading has the mind-dulling title Ambient Findability. Despite the title and some tongue-twisting terminology, it is about on how we find information and how we give authority to information. For one thing, it discusses how ease trumps validity when we search for information, especially when so much information is available. In the online world, ignoring the libel issues of the item you referred to, were it still online and get enough traffic, backlinks etc., it potentially could find itself climbing in Google rankings, gathering more traffic still and, simply through being high in the rankings and being repeated enough times, become “true” in the sense that people would start believing it was true even though there was no actual legitimate, factual information to support it. You Google a name. This comes up. It must be true. Google is easy. Other research is not and takes more time. We all say extreme things. But in this case, where it was public, was there no one to say, “Hey, you’re over the top here”? Not likely because, within the tribe, it tells us what we want to hear. Truth is a secondary consideration (if considered at all). This may just be an off-the-charts example of something we’re all doing now. (Sorry for being long-winded.)