Is This Why People Disagree More Than Ever?

Are we all watching a different movie?

It’s a question I keep coming back to. How can people have such wildly different views on politics, countries, war, sport, history — you name it? Is it because, outside of our own lived experience, the only gateway we have to the rest of the world is what we watch and listen to?

Our movie.

The radio station you listen to is part of your soundtrack. The reels you watch on Facebook. The posts you see on Twitter and Instagram. The shows you choose on Netflix or YouTube. The podcasts you follow. All of it forms your personal movie — the story of the world as it’s presented to you.

So when you bump into someone you haven’t seen for 20 years, you’re not just catching up with a person. You’re comparing two completely different movies.

When We All Watched the Same Film

Think back to the 1970s and early ’80s.

Our movie as children was BBC One, BBC Two, and ITV. That was it. During the day, there wasn’t even any television. What you saw in the evening was what your parents watched. What you heard was what people at school talked about.

If you grew up in the countryside, your world was mud, fields, streams, and village life. You knew the names of the people in your village. That was your universe.

Entertainment was shared. Most families watched the same programmes:

The Two Ronnies
Morecambe and Wise
Coronation Street
Emmerdale
Grange Hill
That’s Life

You might lean toward ITV for lighter entertainment. The BBC felt a bit more educational. BBC Two had documentaries and creative programming. But fundamentally, we were watching variations of the same thing.

When you met your mates in the pub, you shared a common knowledge base. You’d seen the same news bulletin at 6pm. You’d heard the same headlines. There were fewer pundits and fewer opinions. News was shorter, and largely fact-delivery.

It wasn’t perfect. But it was shared.

The Gradual Splitting of the Screen

In the ’80s, we got Channel 4. Then Channel 5 in the 90’s. Then Sky arrived and exploded the number of channels from five to fifty.

The shared movie started to fracture.

There were still big national events — the Olympics, FA Cup Finals, Six Nations — that brought people together. But increasingly, viewing became selective.

Then came the internet.

Early internet felt fairly benign. Emails. Information. Basic websites. It wasn’t an entertainment ecosystem in the way it is now. But by the 2000s, something fundamental had changed.

Now, everybody can have their own individual movie.

Algorithms and the Personal Movie

Today, your news may not come from the BBC. It may come from YouTube, TikTok, Facebook Reels, or podcasts.

And here’s where it gets interesting.

Your viewing preferences guide what you are shown. If you lean towards environmental activism, your feed will likely show you content reinforcing that perspective. If you lean against it, you’ll be shown the counter-argument, backed by its own experts, data, and statistics.

Both sides feel informed. Both sides feel correct. Both sides feel the other must be mad.

These platforms are not built to challenge you. They are built to keep you engaged long enough to serve adverts. The goal is not balanced truth — it’s attention.

So your movie increasingly reinforces what you already believe.

When Two Movies Collide

This becomes obvious when discussing politics.

Broadly speaking — and labels don’t work perfectly anymore — you might describe two broad outlooks:

Collectivist: more state intervention, redistribution, higher taxes.
Individualist: smaller state, lower taxes, greater personal freedom.

If you’ve consumed years of content reinforcing one side, you’ll see the world through that lens.

When you sit down with someone from the other camp, you aren’t just disagreeing. You are referencing entirely different source material.

You are quoting different facts.

You are referencing different experts.

You are drawing from different documentaries, podcasts, data sets, and narratives.

It’s like arguing about a film when you’ve watched different versions of it.

COVID: The Ultimate Split Screen

If there was a moment that exposed this division fully, it was COVID.

Some believed strict lockdowns and restrictions were essential to save lives. Others believed the economic and social damage would be catastrophic and disproportionate.

Some trusted government messaging completely. Others sought out alternative scientists, podcasts, and data analysis.

Masks divided people. Vaccines divided people. Compliance divided people.

Where did those different views come from?

Different movies.

Some argue governments used strong fear-based messaging to secure compliance. Others argue the measures were necessary given the uncertainty at the time. The point isn’t who was right here — it’s that people were watching entirely different information streams.

And once someone has spent months immersed in one stream, it’s incredibly difficult to bridge the gap in a casual conversation. You’d need days to align on basic assumptions before even starting the debate.

Why It Feels Harder to Communicate Now

We may not have ever been further apart.

Each side feels morally certain. Each side feels the other is not just mistaken, but dangerous.

And that’s because their movie tells them so.

When you understand that the person opposite you has been fed a completely different narrative, different data, different heroes and villains — it becomes easier to see why conversations break down.

It’s not just disagreement.

It’s competing realities.