I don't disagree, I just think that social media is the root cause of a lot of the perception issues.
Take "violent crime" for instance. Every meaningful marker of violence in Canadian & American society is way down since we were kids. But a massive percentage of north americans are convinced that they live in a uniquely violent time, the stats are a lie (because you know, violent crime stats were better in the 80's or something). It's an easy perception to have though if you're part of, say, a facebook group that posts literally every fucking violent incident in your city.
A bit of anecdata....so I've lived in Barrie off and on for almost 30 years now. Back when I was younger I ran with the type of crowd that was in and out of the downtown bars here. The bouncers, bartenders, managers, etc, all friends or friends of a friend. Fights were normal to see, a couple of times each weekend easy. Police presence was a hilarious joke for the most part, and the downtown strip was/is basically 3-4 nightclubs and a dozen or more pubs/bars all jammed into a ~500m stretch of Dunlop. Was a zoo every fri-sat after 1:30pm.
So I said that to say this....I'm on a couple of the facebook news groups here just to see wtf is happening, and almost every "incident" downtown gets a post on one of the groups and the comments run 100+ deep with middle aged people talking about how dangerous Barrie is, how it wasn't like this when they were growing up here, something something casual racism about "people from Toronto". The same shit went on 25 years ago, those people just stayed the fuck home on Friday nights, didn't go out, didn't see it, and didn't have a facebook group telling them how bad it actually was. Remove social media and those people would just go to bingo, or whatever the fuck those people do and have no idea about what has been happening after midnight in their city for decades.
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