Being "colorblind" on the net, an observation
This is not a meta about DU (though it may apply here) - but about some observations of mine on the nature of posting online since the days of the old BBS boards (you know, the ones where you needed a phone) up to modern times.
One of the first two BBS's I was on (Bulletin Board Systems) was run by a local guy. Some games, discussion groups etc. The other was from a local church (that I did not attend but we had few such systems in my small town so we all jumped on the ones we could).
This was in a mostly white town (small town in Northern Ohio). I can't recall us ever talking about race and such.
Fast Forward to today and our varied special interest groups and places to post.
And fast forward to our new way of life:
We see everyone as suspect. From going into an airport to who owns a gun to what a person says, what web sites they go to, etc and so on - we are damned suspicious of each other.
This gets worse as we segment ourselves out more on the net. A new person posts something that most don't agree with (but some do) and we suddenly think that person is 'one of them'.
Even internally at many sites you see the same thing. You post something on a rw site positive about gay marriage? You are a left wing troll at worst or you are a wayward sinner at best.
Don't agree on a progressive board about certain gun laws? You are a rw nut who humps guns and don't care if kids die (well, American kids anyway, no one cares if we kill kids in the ME with drones ya know - see, I can do it as well).
We can judge a person, their intent, their whole life and who they are based on a few choice things they say out of the many things they could say.
The net is colorblind, more so than any other medium out there. But we still have our own biases and apply them without even giving them a thought at times.
We don't have to agree on every issue to be friends. To care about many of the same things. To want the same things. Sometimes we see other avenues there. A person can live 40 years of life and have their whole being compressed down to a few words and dismissed.
And that, to me, is not very progressive. But that is the new reality on the internet. We color someone based on the smallest of things and toss them to the wayside. And it gets worse the deeper you go into many websites - from geeks to politics to movies.
We removed race online and replaced it with a million other things by which to judge the entirety of someone. And it has done nothing but serve to fragment people even more than they were before - we have more people to hate, distrust, and fear than any other time.