Just food for thought, 50 years ago the population was about 3 billion people.
When I was born 35 years ago it was about 5 billion.
Today it is 7 billion.
20 years ago the first Internet service providers were just emerging into the mainstream until the explosion started in 1995
In the last 50 years alone that's a more than 2 for 1 increase in population, and that doesn't take into account the advent of the Internet that took the entire world from a communications, from isolated communities to a single global social community. Today there are approximately 2 billion Internet users, and when you combine that with a conservative value to
Dunbars number of 100 it means that, the global communication network outside of xenophobic groups or the increasingly rare physically isolated communities means that we are a single social species now, there are no more tribes, the lines are still there but socially there are no longer any boundaries to communication between any two people on this planet outside of their choice NOT to communicate. This is a truly powerful driving factor of social evolution.
Social dynamics have changed drastically, even significantly in less developed countries, but there are virtually no isolated social groups left on the planet, they're all merging into one.
What makes this incredibly hard to deal with or study is Dunbar's number, because there are no longer small groups of people closely associated with one another, everyone has the ability to connect with anyone and social dynamics are no longer physically constrained,
due to the increase number of people that we can communicate with the depth of that communication necessarily has to decrease and it pervades virtually everything, leaving the great social masses in a sort of frothing mega sea of information and connectivity and no way to filter through it all in a meaningful way.
Suffice to say the world it is a changing! The young are simply growing up in a world that couldn't even have been fathomed just a handful of years ago, from a social standpoint to older individuals the young are alien, this has always been the case, but with the population/social pressures in the last 20 years it is occurring at rate so high that the human mind simply can't cope.
The social landscape of this planet will be in upheaval for years to come, even if the world somehow manages to blow up and leave it in ruins, the young and those that grew up with it will ALWAYS remember this increased level of communication and no one will ever be satisfied with being closed remote groups again, it's to far too much advantage that we all interact with each other, even if it's hard to deal with.
The human race is just going through social growing pains.
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