I think you hit on a lot of key reasons, but I don't think that's the whole of it. There's definitely a lack of true dialog. I think social media is a HUGE part of this. If it doesn't fit in a 140 characters, a meme, a 30 second tiktok, or a headline, it doesn't get seen. Very few issues can be fully addressed in one or two sentences. We want the easy answers, and one line answer sound nice and are easy to share, but don't really address the issues honestly. Social media and the digital age also means way less face to face time. Outside of forums like this or a chat function like discord, there's not a lot of digital venues to have real conversations (way to go TOTJO for centering around avenues for real dialog!) at least for the youngest couple generations (gen z and gen alpha, and to some extent millennials) in person conversations just don't exist.
That being said, I have to disagree with the sentiment that kids today just don't have a good work ethic. Every generation says that about the next generation. It was said about Gen X, Gen Y, and now Gen Z. It feels like one of the most overdone tropes of all time, but yet it still catches on because it still rings true (as people forget what their generation was like or simply don't understand the values of the next generation). That being said, it is a little different this time around because of how much the world has changed. Gen Z grew up watching the economy fall apart, their parents and grandparents work until the day they die because the promise of "work hard and then enjoy retirement" has dissolved. The days of giving your all for a company and knowing they'll take care of you in return are long gone. In a lot of ways Gen Z is just smarter than previous generations (largely because they have access to data that previous generations didn't), and know that hard work only gets you so far. Who you know, what family you're born into, and how much you network and sell yourself, and working smart not hard are the things that really help people get ahead while the those who network end up climbing a staircase made of the heads of people working hard below them. This generation also recognizes that companies today have zero loyalty to their employees. Not only are companies continuing to ask more and more and respect fewer boundaries forcing employees to be stricter about enforcing boundaries and not giving allowing any give and take because they know it's all give and no take, but companies also won't hesitate to throw a hard working employee who has dedicated decades of their life to the company out the window the first chance it's convenient or profitable to do so. Instead of putting all their time and energy into making more money for some company that seems them as nothing more than an expendable number, the newest generations often choose to put their times into things that they perceive value in. Their own health and well being is one of those things they value, perhaps a lot more than previous generations, but things that build the community are another big avenue. More than ever before they want to spend their time doing something valuable, not wasting their effort on a faceless corporation that could care less about them. Every generation seems lazy to the previous generations because people at a certain age do tend to be lazy and they build a work ethic over the course of their life (and then often forget how far they've come themselves and how bad they were at that age). It is more pronounced with this generation because on top of that they also are putting their effort into different things than previous generations did, and so they appear especially lazy to those whose filter is that effort should be put into a day job. That turned out to be a much longer rant than I meant, but I think it's important to see it from a different perspective. Yes, employees of that age are lazy, as has been true for every generation, but even more importantly those of that age currently who are really hard working aren't putting that hard work into a day job that they see no value in. They are often putting into bettering themselves or their community, places where their efforts will be appreciated or actually pay off.
And, uh, back to the main topic. Social media and the reduction of honest dialog into a one line slogan is a huge part of it. The information overload you mentioned is another. All of this is missing a key detail, though, which is that it would be okay to just trust the headline if the headlines were honest. Since news companies are no longer isolated from the profits and ratings they generate and live only so long as they get a lot of viewers, headlines have become increasingly clickbaity or deceptive. They aren't technically untrue but they are often half truths designed to get people worked up over nothing, enough that people click on their article or video on the topic that would otherwise be really boring. The fact that one of our major news outlets just made a 750 billion dollar settlement for actively lying to their viewers for months/years because it helped with ratings is just tip of the iceberg. They all do it, that was just the one to be so blatant about it and to do it in a way that specifically hurt one entity enough that a big lawsuit like that was possible. I remember seeing a headline a while back during the height of the computer chip shortage saying something along the lines of "Biden leads campaign to prevent construction of new computer chip plant". The full story was that Biden was working to keep that plant from being built in China, instead trying to work out a deal for it to instead be built in the US or one of our allies (and it eventually did go to the US, though it's now running into issues where the parent company in Taiwan are saying that US workers are too lazy for the plant to be successful, which is ironic considering my previous paragraph). The point is, the headline was technically correct (he was trying to stop that plant in China from being built) but super misleading, probably intentionally misleading. It seems like all the news agencies do it, because that's what gets clicks and makes money. Paywalls also probably don't help. Sometimes all we can read of an article is the headline unless we want to subscribe to a company that we many never see again for that one article. Unless we really go out of our way to find the details, that headline is going to stick in our brain without the larger context whether we want it to or not. Politicians haven't helped either. At least in the US there's been an organized effort to create greater political division. Freshman Representatives in the US House that used to be sat all together with freshman from both sides of the aisle when they first start out are now siloed with seat assignments at the far edges where the only voices around them and influencing them and the only people they network with are from their own party. Once they've become deeply entrenched they get moved to the center seats so new freshman can take their places at far right and left edges of the chamber. It isn't just that we've all forgotten how to have a dialog. The systems feeding public opinion are themselves actively trying to drive a wedge between people as well. It's good for ratings and it's good for campaign contributions. Plus, the more people are mad and distracted by senseless arguments and half truths, the more they can slip things that would be universally unpopular through unnoticed.
I also think you're right that we are not teaching people how to think critically and do quality research on topics. A lot of that is thanks to search engines that spoon feed every answer to people. They don't look into things more than the two second answer. I think a lot of it is also faith in low quality sources, though. Instead of listening to experts who have spent their entire lives studying a field, people think they can know more about the subject by reading one blog post or memes on Facebook. We have too many armchair philosophers who really know what they're talking about or what constitutes quality evidence or quality sources of information but don't realize how much they don't know. First hand testimony, for instance, is actually a big problem from my perspective. In the scientific world that's called anecdotal and is the lowest quality of evidence you can provide. As humans we have evolved to understand stories. Relying on stories has kept us alive. Unfortunately between that and the fact that we generally don't know how to critically assess the quality of statistics, it leaves us far too eager to trust a single story over a mountain of rigorously collected data. Yes, statistics can lie, and that's why people need to understand how statistics really work. Single stories can lie, too, not because they are themselves false but because they are an outlier that misleads people into thinking they are the norm. People share a story and everyone jumps on it. People share high quality peer reviewed research by highly respected experts in the field and everyone ignores it. We should question things, but we also need to recognize that we sometimes lack the expertise necessary to properly question some complicated topics and need to defer to people far more knowledgeable about the topic than us to question it for us.
All that being said, I totally want to bang my head against the wall every time someone says, "oh well if that's true I would have heard about it."
I also realize that in all of this I somehow missed one of the biggest reasons why we're becoming more extreme: it's profitable for social media. People stay on social media longer and engage more actively if they're either getting worked up over something. The companies know this, they've been called out for it and in some countries received huge fines for actively choosing to use algorithms that they know cause greater division because those algorithms are more profitable. After all, what are you more likely to engage with? Is it something you agree with or something you disagree with? Is it something reasonable and relatively boring, or some extreme view that you gets under your skin? It's misleading or divisive content that gets comments and user engagement, and that keeps people spending more time on the platform and watching more ads. The algorithms that run social media sites know this and because their job is to optimize user engagement and time spent on the platform, they optimize for that type of content. Either they create echo chambers where people just respond how much they agree or they prioritize divisive content. Either way the algorithms are destroying bridges and building walls.
Now what's the solution? IDK. Forums, chat systems, and environments that facilitate and foster true dialog are probably a step in the right direction. Better education that teaches people to be critical thinkers instead of sheltering people from any views deemed politically incorrect by whoever happens to be in power at that time is also probably a huge step in the right direction. In the end, though, there's too much money to be made creating division so it's an uphill battle. I guess the first step is to be part of the solution ourselves. Question our own views, seek out opinions we disagree with, and rigorously fact check the things we assume to be true. In particular, we have to be careful not to share things ourselves that we haven't fact checked in order to prevent becoming part of the problem.
