Finding Facebook in Anna Karenina

I'm reading Anna Karenina for the first time and really enjoying it. Tolstoy is so insightful; his writing often resonates with my experience. Anna Karenina was written around 1875, and it contains this passage:

"In his Petersburg world all people were divided into utterly opposed classes. One, the lower class, vulgar, stupid, and, above all, ridiculous people, who believe that one husband ought to live with the one wife whom he has lawfully married; that a girl should be innocent, a woman modest, and a man manly, self-controlled, and strong; that one ought to bring up one's children, earn one's bread, and pay one's debts; and various similar absurdities. This was the class of old-fashioned and ridiculous people. But there was another class of people, the real people. To this class they all belonged, and in it the great thing was to be elegant, generous, plucky, gay, to abandon oneself without a blush to every passion, and to laugh at everything else."

I cannot overstate how contemporary this feels to me as I read it.

Facebook's "trending" section daily overflows with stories of "offendedness." Taking offense is likely a human inevitability, but acceptable offense, as in the quote above, flows in one direction. Only one of the classes is called ridiculous; the other class is simply referred to as "real." The first class clearly offends the second, and if the reverse is true as well, no one cares, because the reigning narratives are written by the second class's point of view and presented as real, unbiased fact. Today as I confirmed the title of the trending section I happened to notice a very current case in point. The first story was about an airline apologizing to a passenger for asking her to cover up on a flight. I clicked through to a slew of outraged responses defending her clothing choice."A woman [should be] modest." What ridiculous, old-fashioned, stupid person would think anyone should be modest? Or would dare ask a person to do anything at all for the sake of those around them? The airplane was publicly called out for "slut-shaming" and will surely think twice before asking passengers to dress in a manner appropriate for being in public.

Not everyone thinks the same way as the "class of real people." Politically, America's largely divided into conservatives and liberals, which may loosely correspond to the classes in the quote, but there are plenty of different ideas out there. More and more, the "real" class's opinions are presented as neutral facts while the opinions of the others are considered outdated, unacceptable, and quite frankly, objectively speaking, ridiculous. Especially in today's Petersburg world of Facebook.