It can totally connect the world and help foster dialogue, but the humans using it have to want to connect with other humans and engage in meaningful dialogue with them. Some people do, but most of humanity probably doesn't even realize that that's an ideal they should try to aspire to. I think we're witnessing a decades-long process of the internet evolving and humanity slowly catching up to it, in terms of things like etiquette and expectations for social interaction and slowly learning to have empathy for strangers elsewhere in the world typing things into little boxes.
So much of humanity came online in such a short period of time, it's bound to be chaos for a few more decades. If you took 1000 of the world's smartest, kindest, and most articulate people, stuffed them all in the same giant room, and only allowed them to interact via shortish typed messages with no other social queues, those people would probably descend into anarchy and barbarism within weeks or months. The internet's kind of like that except it's several billion people covering the full range of age, intelligence, education, economic status, religion, language, nationality, mental health, maturity, etc.
I'm hoping that in 20 years we'll look back on how things are now in the same way we look back on the '90s...with a combination of nostalgia for how many unsettled frontiers there were, coupled with amazement at our collective naivete when seen in hindsight. It'll still seem like everything's terrible in 2036, but I suspect we'll all still feel like it's way better than it was back in 2016.
So much of humanity came online in such a short period of time, it's bound to be chaos for a few more decades. If you took 1000 of the world's smartest, kindest, and most articulate people, stuffed them all in the same giant room, and only allowed them to interact via shortish typed messages with no other social queues, those people would probably descend into anarchy and barbarism within weeks or months. The internet's kind of like that except it's several billion people covering the full range of age, intelligence, education, economic status, religion, language, nationality, mental health, maturity, etc.
I'm hoping that in 20 years we'll look back on how things are now in the same way we look back on the '90s...with a combination of nostalgia for how many unsettled frontiers there were, coupled with amazement at our collective naivete when seen in hindsight. It'll still seem like everything's terrible in 2036, but I suspect we'll all still feel like it's way better than it was back in 2016.