In the era of pervasive internet when it’s now technically possible (though EXTREMELY inadvisable) to attempt to “talk” to hundreds of people a day and “convince” them of things… let me ask you, what human could sustain this effort?
Avoiding this is not due to a lack of empathy but a realization that people are not, in fact, endless wells of empathy, and given a chance the infinite mass of “people that disagree on the internet” would suck all the empathy out of us like vampires, leaving us none for our children, families, people we actually like etc.
Back in the days when you could really only talk to maybe a dozen people in a day, this “let’s talk to them individually and sway them to our side” strategery might have been tenable. In the era of every human having a 24/7 connected smartphone in their pocket, it is not. Attempting that strategy today won’t just merely not work… it is frankly more likely to kill you.
(And that’s putting aside the thousands of partisan and even outright racist personalities and channels already talking to them via direct person-to-person channels on the internet today. This ain’t your father’s ABC, NBC, CBS any more.)
