Ask Lemmy

Vaguely, I think a lot of my outlook on life came from reading Terry Pratchett and Ian M Banks amongst others

eyup but im over 50 and I never took to popular social media (facebook, twitter, and the new stuff I can't even remember the names) so my social media journey is like slashdot then reddit then here.

No . Btw I'm left of center. My views haven't changed that much because of the net

It's hard to say. Maybe if I'd never had any higher education, read certain books, been exposed to the same discussion venues.

No.

I wouldn't go to the extreme of being a completely different person, a reactionary or something, but I would be much less than I am now, and that would be bad for me.

I say I would not go to extremes because my parents are already within the left political spectrum and because of their upbringing I have a predilection to it, but it is certain that I would not have delved as deep as I have so far.

On the religious side, however, I don't think there were any changes. I didn't believe when I was a child, and I believe less now, even though my mother is very devoted to God and I am baptized. It is what it is.

Yes, but i wouldn't have words for it. It would be harder to find like-minded people.

Probably because my reasons for my beliefs is based on science, which has been a thing for a much longer time.

No. The internet and the later WWW have been so instrumental in my life there is no way I'd have not had been influenced differently.

I've worked through so many arguments and unsafe questions in online spaces that simply wouldn't have been possible in the very conservative areas I grew up. I'd likely have had to seek answers with out groups and ended up elsewhere adding to my changed influences. I'd have likely had a very different career path too.

I'm faithful that I'd have ended up in the same religion but it'd have taken a much darker journey to get there.

Yeah. I still would have studies science and that alone is enough to convince one that the ideology of the right is fucking idiotic.

I formed my filthy inclusive solidarity leftist agenda before the web was a thing.

Though I did use dial-up BBS and FidoNet and later Usenet and email and FTP and some federated remote file polling services I don't remember, mostly to get my hands on newsletters and FAQs and docs on studio electronics and hacking and philosophy and occultism and punk rock and industrial music. Regular nerdy computerized teen stuff of ~1990.

But I also frequented the library and hung around in political circles.

So, I guess?

I can state pretty definitively mostly yes because a lot of my formative years were before the internet really existed as such. Www came about when I was about 15. I was already dialing into BBSes and Gopher and IRC before that, but DSL didn't come about until I was in my twenties and I must've been nearly thirty when broadband came about in my neck of the woods.

My swing from right to left was well under way by that point. The internet certainly didn't hurt that, and I might've hung onto some deep-seated bigotry longer without it, but my die was cast probably before 9/11 and certainly after it.

The internet helped me shape my opinion. Independent on a single distributor of newspaper. So probably no and partly yes.
Yes because I don't like being told no without a good reason (or it's the employer paying my bills)

Definitely. I never changed it since before using the internet, "categorical imperative": treat others as you would have them treat you. What changed with the internet? I realized that more people than I thought even in my most pessimistic moments are sociopaths. Conservatives are actually all emotionally retarded, some need therapy, some need prison to protect decent human beings from them.

yeah, my overall opinion of it all hasn't changed much

Yeah. The internet had long existed when I was a kid but I was poor and didn’t have a full-on computer until I was 17ish. (We had a Brother Word Processor with a screen so I could write school papers and copy/paste but it was just a word processor. We might need to bring those back in the age of LLMs, actually. Like TI calculators.) But I read a lot and I think that’s what formed my core opinions.

My music taste would be way worse. You couldn’t just “check out a band” back then. I now know that I like I the soul and R&B more than whatever dogshit I listened to in high school.