It appears that what we're actually seeing is a return to the 'normal' state of individual…
It appears that what we're actually seeing is a return to the 'normal' state of individual knowledge-communities (built around social links & shared interests) developing their own worldviews -- but between mass literacy & the bidirectional public communication provided by the internet (wherein people without institutional support can talk to each other in a context where strangers can see their conversations, at scale) we are, for the first time, seeing other people's worldviews that are dramatically different from ours on a regular basis.
The thing about a global village is that it combines the cosmopolitanism of the globe with the nosiness of a small town. In other words, you can't protect yourself from ridicule by acting 'normal' because there is no 'normal' that is acceptable to most
people, but you also can't easily erect barriers between yourself & strangers with strong ideas about how you should be behaving (without cutting yourself off from the benefits of cosmopolitanism). Lots of people are cutting themselves off (or cutting off specific portions of their identity) and retreating to the "dark forest of the internet", basically to protect themselves from griefing & mobbing, and we may need to collectively develop new norms and a new netiquitte (on top of the technical measures to support them) to handle a much more cosmopolitan world with a much longer memory.
I wrote about this at some length: