"The Internet has brought communities across the globe closer together through instant communication"
About this Quote
It sounds like a celebration of borderless connection, but the phrasing betrays a politician’s instinct to sell the upside while sanding down the risk. “Brought communities… closer together” is classic civic uplift: warm, collective, hard to argue with. “Across the globe” widens the moral frame from local constituency to planetary commons, a useful move for anyone positioning themselves as forward-looking without taking a controversial stance on specific policies. The line is engineered to feel obvious, like progress itself.
The subtext sits in what gets omitted. “Instant communication” is treated as an unalloyed good, as if speed automatically produces understanding. In reality, the same compression of time that enables solidarity also accelerates outrage, disinformation, and tribal sorting. By naming the mechanism (instant communication) rather than the outcomes (better knowledge, stronger democracy), the quote sidesteps measurable claims and responsibility. It’s optimism with plausible deniability.
Context matters: Fitzpatrick, a British politician, spoke from a period when the Internet had already shifted from novelty to infrastructure, with social media and smartphones making “community” both more real and more performative. The word “communities” is doing heavy lifting here. It suggests grassroots intimacy, yet online communities can be anonymous, ephemeral, and algorithmically curated. That ambiguity is the point: it lets the listener project their preferred version of the Internet - reunion with distant family, niche support networks, global activism - without confronting the costs.
As rhetoric, it works because it borrows the Internet’s most flattering self-myth: connection as destiny, proximity as virtue, and technology as a neutral bridge rather than a battleground.
The subtext sits in what gets omitted. “Instant communication” is treated as an unalloyed good, as if speed automatically produces understanding. In reality, the same compression of time that enables solidarity also accelerates outrage, disinformation, and tribal sorting. By naming the mechanism (instant communication) rather than the outcomes (better knowledge, stronger democracy), the quote sidesteps measurable claims and responsibility. It’s optimism with plausible deniability.
Context matters: Fitzpatrick, a British politician, spoke from a period when the Internet had already shifted from novelty to infrastructure, with social media and smartphones making “community” both more real and more performative. The word “communities” is doing heavy lifting here. It suggests grassroots intimacy, yet online communities can be anonymous, ephemeral, and algorithmically curated. That ambiguity is the point: it lets the listener project their preferred version of the Internet - reunion with distant family, niche support networks, global activism - without confronting the costs.
As rhetoric, it works because it borrows the Internet’s most flattering self-myth: connection as destiny, proximity as virtue, and technology as a neutral bridge rather than a battleground.
Quote Details
| Topic | Internet |
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