Technology is destroying America, but it’s not the self-driving cars, loss of privacy or generation of young people buried in cell phones.

It’s Facebook.

Twenty years ago, the U.S. had skinheads and radicals on both the left and right. But 20 years ago, the radicals couldn’t find each other – their circle of crazies was small. They knew Aunt Ethel and Uncle Jake had some pretty bizarre ideas about blacks and poor people, and they knew their parents kinda, sorta agreed. But that was the circle.

Today, 1.7 million people share hateful comments on Facebook, Twitter and other social media. And by God, if 1.7 million people viewed an anti-anyone diatribe and 300,000 “like” it, it must clearly reflect the opinion of most Americans.

In the good old days, circa 1990, we got our news from the local newspaper, one of the three major TV channels or, if we were really intent on keeping up to date, a magazine such as Newsweek or U.S. News & World Report. While both the right and left arms of the political spectrum considered those publications biased for completely opposite reasons, they usually fell somewhere within spitting distance of the middle.

As a result, people tended to be moderate. At the least, they tended to at least see both sides even if they disagreed. Today we pick our friends, our editors and our platforms. We pick our walls and never look out the window.

We live in an echo chamber of political ideas instead of an auditorium of voices.

If you skew right, you watch Fox News and read Facebook updates about hating Obama. If you skew left, you read stories about racial injustice, even if the event happened in Bogs Head, North Dakota, population 14.

The result: We snuggle deep into a comforter of bias and believe that the world – almost all of America beyond a few crazy individuals – believes exactly what we believe. If the opposite side actually has a valid point, we either ignore it or, more often than not, never hear it because we’ve self-selected our news sources.

America – the human race – doesn’t move forward by ignoring those who disagree. If, on rare occasion, the “other side” makes a valid point, the appropriate response should be: “No, that can’t be true,” followed by “Damn, that makes some sense. I’ll have to think about that.”

Weighing all the facts shouldn’t be hard, but it is – thanks to technology.

© 2015 SmithTakes.com