> And this increase happened suddenly, between 2008 and 2010
Occam’s Razor tells me that it’s almost certainly linked to the near-total failure of the economic system (and the very slow recovery outside specific US cities).
It is obviously social media: more connections does not equally mean social interactions - people substituted costly and hard in-person for cheap and easy online interactions, with AI optimization fueling the polarization.
It would correlate well with the social media boom in the late 2000s. Digg, Reddit, Twitter, Google's purchase and aggressive expansion of Youtube, etc. 4Chan.
When did algorithmic recommendations (by which I mean injecting content into your feed to maintain attention, rather than an attempt to rank by quality) become commonplace? ISTR Youtube was being criticised for pushing conspiracy theories in the late 2000s, but I could be misremembering the timeline.
It is just as obviously late stage capitalism - as everyone is busy working 10-12 hours just to survive you have zero time left for costly and hard in-person interactions.
Occam’s Razor tells me that it’s almost certainly linked to the near-total failure of the economic system (and the very slow recovery outside specific US cities).