Needless to say, today is a pretty good example of why I need to go out and trundle around London every day. Due to the rain, I’ve been stuck in all day, mostly at my computer, mostly on Facebook. The problem is, what I’ve been coming across has been making me more and more agitated. I’ve written here before about how wound up I get about things like politics, and today has been no exception. To calm myself down and cool off, every day I like to head out in my powerchair at about eleven or twelve to explore the metropolis. I find the change in activity really helps me refocus and think. Today, though, I’ve been stuck in due to the rain, getting more and more wound up by the increasingly idiotic things I’ve been coming across.

The thing is, it kind of makes me wonder: can a more general problem be read into this? Many other people have noted how we as a society all seem to be becoming increasingly uptight and adversarial with one another. Tempers seem to be growing shorter and shorter; people seem to be loosing their cool more and more easily. I wonder, could the rise of social media have something to do with this? I am no psychologist of course, but it seems to me that the way in which the Internet has made interpersonal communication easier than it ever has been, allowing billions of people from across the globe to exchange messages, thoughts and opinions in a way never seen before, may have had an adverse effect. On the web, we are just as likely to come across opinions which we don’t agree with than those we do; it also gives us the ability to comment on anything we come across, whether we agree with it or not. The problem is, we all seem to be finding this increasingly infuriating, and I can’t help wondering whether it could have something to do with the rise in right wing politics across Europe.

As for myself, I certainly hope the weather is good enough for me to go out tomorrow. Rain and powerchairs really don’t mix, but an afternoon at my computer starts to drive me bonkers. More broadly though, I suspect that is part of a larger issue. The internet may have brought everyone together in a way never seen before, but the downside of that may be a rise in echo chambers and political antagonism, the consequences of which might not be quite so cool.