Has the internet been bad for cooperation?

Here is a question for you to consider: is the internet pushing us away from cooperation and compromise and into warring camps staring at each other medieval style from opposite sides of a battle field? Surfing around on websites devoted to local issues has made me wonder. It seems as if every issue has facebook pages or blogs or web sites or all of the above plus twitter followings devoted to one side or the other (or one side and the other). On these pages people of like minds can gather and get each other psyched up for battle twenty four hours a day. These sites provide a place for people to vent, remind each other of how they have been slighted, and dream up put-downs and insults, and get angrier and angrier. You don’t have to wait until city council meetings to share grievances, and you don’t have to reserve a room at the library (remember when people did that all the time?), because any time can be a time to trade grievances. The internet also gives them a place where they are safe from the enemy. Oh, the other side can come in, but you can always meet them in numbers. You never have to meet them one on one and think of them as another human being with genuinely held interests. I know that people have disagreed since there were people, and that disagreements have been nasty for at least as long. It just seems a little nastier now, and there seems to be less compromise and cooperation to balance it out. I’m not sure if there is anything to it … but at the least something to think about.