Great points here. Yeah it seems like any constructive dialogue that ever happened on the internet has been limited. This goes twice as much for the comment threads that preceded the current social media hegemony.

Not that it isn’t possible, but it would seem that in the best of times, even small comment threads with small groups or high levels of moderation [1] that work only do so for a while.

Many times this is a function of their success in that the more people who care about the dialogue in a certain place will surely cause others to come in to join (others who don’t know the context of the that group and will turn out to disrupt the status quo not always in good ways). Meanwhile there’s always the issue of “brigading” (either flooding with bots or people the entire ecosystem of a single thread and making conversation useless.

And yet though there may be solutions to this text-based issue of the internet, you’ve pointed out how face to face meetings (and grassroots movements as well) still end up being better as a medium for human interaction. [2]

Which brings us back to the solution which seems to be the face-to-face meetings that work better than others.

Perhaps one day we’ll have a new way to use the internet that manages to give credence to the face-to-face (reality) while combined with power of getting the word out like the internet (how it was meant to be as you mentioned). This could be done in many ways, like giving more weight to people in the same place boosting a “fact” etc. Let’s see.

Thanks again for this piece. I look forward to more from you.

[1] I think that at times places like r/Askhistorians will work, even though that has its issues as well.

[2] I want to point out that things that were previously attributed to social media, like the Arab Spring, seem not to have been that exactly. Many claim Twitter and other apps were responsible for this one. Yet it seems that the Mubarak Regime immediately cut off all internet access when the protests began and people had face to face meetings that truly helped. That being said, given previous revolutions and counter-revolutionary forces, one does wonder if it could have been better off with more grassroots aspects to its power as a movement.