I think there is a case to be made that it has gotten worse. For example, before social media a lot of social interaction happened in public areas with a more diverse group of people.
With social media you can pick and choose who you interact with, and what content you consume. To make things worse, companies use algorithms that are more likely to show you things you like and already agree with to increase engagement in their platform.
Additionally from my perspective, it seems society is reverting back to a sort of tribalism, where people identify with a specific group and are more and more unwilling to find common ground with one another or to even have respect for differing viewpoints. Things are only seen as black and white, and anyone that doesn't agree is wrong, and must be silenced.
I've had older coworkers say the same thing. They said that when your social circle was usually your coworkers and neighbors, you had to make an effort to get along, and if you had any sort of extreme viewpoints, you had to remember that there were real life consequences to everything you said. Now you can hide your extreme viewpoints from people you interract with, and probably find groups online who share the same viewpoints and only interact with them, getting the false opinion that an extreme viewpoint is normal and socially acceptable.
> They said that when your social circle was usually your coworkers and neighbors, you had to make an effort to get along
People still have neighbors and coworkers.
> Now you can hide your extreme viewpoints from people you interract with, and probably find groups online who share the same viewpoints and only interact with them, getting the false opinion that an extreme viewpoint is normal and socially acceptable.
The choice to isolate yourself in a like-minded bubble was always available.
On the right: most church communities in small midwestern/southern towns will make social media bubbles look like veritable cornucopias of diversity. Or if you have to live in a larger metro, you can very easily find pockets of people who all attend the same church, work for the same few employers, live in the same zip-code, etc. At my first employer (small finance company in the rural midwest) I joined a church because it was the only way to fit in. I think it's fair to say that the majority of the private K12 schools in the USA and the majority of the home-schooling community are explicitly about isolating your family from the out-group.
On the left: same thing. Live in the city, in particular neighborhoods within the city, send your kids to the right montessori, attend a liberal mainline church (or no church), etc.
I don't think there are more people isolating themselves in bubbles. It's just way easier and far less painful to moan about social media than to point out that a huge fraction of our built world and social infrastructure has the effect of forming various types of bubbles.
Social bubbles make it hard to maintain a huge coalition, because disagreeing with any one part of the hive mind can make life in the bubble unbearable even if you are happy with 90% of the other stuff (e.g., if you're socially and fiscally conservative except that you're openly gay, then the rural midwest church is probably a bubble you'll leave). Precise targeted and personalized advertising doesn't have that attribute.
> it seems society is reverting back to a sort of tribalism
"Reverting" implies it ever left. Is it not possible that our media system, in the past, just enforced uniformity to effectively create one tribe of people who consumed it and excluded everyone else? As the environment gets more diverse, then the existing tribalism, and the conflicts it engenders, just become more evident.
With social media you can pick and choose who you interact with, and what content you consume. To make things worse, companies use algorithms that are more likely to show you things you like and already agree with to increase engagement in their platform.
Additionally from my perspective, it seems society is reverting back to a sort of tribalism, where people identify with a specific group and are more and more unwilling to find common ground with one another or to even have respect for differing viewpoints. Things are only seen as black and white, and anyone that doesn't agree is wrong, and must be silenced.