I sound very old when I say this, but it's nonetheless very true. Society's ability to co-exist with one another is shifting rapidly into chaos, and it's the ability to get online and slag each other off without fear of reprisal which seems to be at the base of it all
Yes, I agree. You do sound very old when you say that. It's pretty much what every older generation says about the next. Just copy and paste.
But I love to argue with you, and why, you were making a point. And you are right, internet is changing society. One way this is obvious is in language trends. Most smaller languages (less than 100,000 speakers) are dying at an incredible pace. Only the largest languages...English, Spanish, Chinese...and about 5 others, I won't name them all, are hanging on. And I attribute this to a smaller world...people don't live in isolation as much, and children tend to adopt the dominate language when given a choice, and English, being the codepage that all our computers have, is the biggest benefactor of technologies progress.
I know this is all boring to us internet users, and quick I better make a joke or flash a picture of a naked woman, because I'm losing the audience with this crap....
but, if someone were to guess the future, a future, with fewer languages, is one of the biggest things to happen to humanity in thousands of years, if you ask me. I know a lot of English speakers, think this trend is great.
But it will be like killing off French in Lousianna (or Hawaiian in Hawaii). It sounded great until after it was successful. Then the legislature went back and adopted acadian as an official language. (and similarly in Hawaii, they set up Hawaiian immerson schools to try to save the language from extinction) Suddenly states realized they had been benefiting from diversity...being a cookie cutter image of every other state does nothing for tourism.
And as a student of language...thinking is different in different languages...different types of thinking can be good for comparison purposes. Still, good or bad, the world is going to march forward and change.
All we can do, is think what we can do, to influence the direction of change, for the better.