“American society as a whole, and politics in particular, has become considerably ruder, cruder, and more paranoid than it used to be,” said John Hawkins in Pajamas Media, and the Internet deserves “more than a smidgen of the blame.” The main reason is that the Web lets people all over the world “say absolutely anything without fear of being punched in the nose.”
It’s true that the Internet has helped make us more “ferociously partisan,” said Robert Stacy McCain in The Other McCain, by giving “small, like-minded groups” a space where they can gather and vent. But television, with 100-plus channels to absorb time educated people once spent reading, “has been a far more powerful contributor to the decline of civility.”
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