What do "men's rights" websites, conspiracy theorists, gun nuts, white supremacists, angry feminists all have in common? All those movements are, to one degree or another, heavily influenced by a very scary side effect of the internet, associability plus the ability to pander and nourish every little frustration and anger to the point of quasi-insanity.
I know I wouldn't have a blog without the internet, but you still have to know how to use it. Here's my favorite little piece of math: imagine ten people; eight of them spend two hours a day on the internet, the last remaining two spend 12 hours a day, each. At the end of the day, the eight 2-hour people will have totaled 16 hours of internet between them while the 2 12-hour surfers will have 24 hours just between the two of them.
The eight people who just spend 2 hours online probably have families, jobs, accomplishments (gaming achievements don't count!). They are the majority of people in the real world. The two people who leave behind 24 hours of clicks and comments most likely don't have anything to do, no jobs, no family or a very bad relationship with it.. 12 hours of computer time, 8 hours of sleep leaves little time for social interaction in the course of a day. As we spend time staring at screens, our ability to interact with people, to difference between what is aggressive and what is not, our ability to understand other people, to relate to them can shrink. Think of all the people who ask for dating advice online, who bitch and moan at women who won't recognize them as "good guys" (i.e, a video game hero) and sleep with them while the only online dating advice that will ever make any kind of sense is "get your butt off the computer chair and go meet people".
Romance is the most ironic topic influenced by online associability, but tell those powerless people who watched too many action movies that all the things that objectively suck about the World and their life is not the product of indifference, a flawed system or (harder to accept) their own fault but all caused by James Bond villain-esque political parties, or revert racism, or an obscure feminist conspiracy or an even more obscure cabbal and you tell them everything they want to hear. You give them someone to blame.
And since people who spend all their time online leave much more clicks and comments online than people who actually have jobs and families, those "conspiracies " are much more popular online than in real life.
