On the one hand, I agree with the arc of this discussion. I would also like to have better tools for societal information sharing, vetting, collaboration, and truth-seeking.
On the other, I’m not sure I buy the premise that this has gotten worse. Whenever I’ve actually looked back at media from the past, what I find is that past media, both mainstream and fringe, were in many ways even worse in terms of information quality than today (other than maybe the high points within very heavily regulated midcentury broadcast TV, which enforced something of a monocultural baseline set of facts, but even then I’m not sure how much of that is a side effect of which broadcasts have been recorded and popularized decades later).
And if I go back further to before broadcasts and newspapers, life was full of conspiracy theories that everyone believed. For much of history politics really was a matter of powerful conspirators making inscrutable decisions and enforcing them on everyone else. The non-human rest of the world was mostly a mystery, people made up powerful supernatural conspirators they imagined were deciding everything, and almost no one thought there was anything wrong with that.
Right on. I’m sure there’s a sense in which you’re right; I’m not a historian, but history is full of counterexamples so we both have a partial picture probably. All I can say for sure is that as a person living in 2025, our media is problematic in a unique way. The amount of social media news consumed is at an all-time high, and social media is on average less accurate about facts than professional news. What’s ironic is that the internet and related communication tech means there really is a huge potential for democratic, productive media; more than any other time in history. I feel like the increase in information people get means that they understand, at least, that they should be critical of news media, and channeling that criticism into a forum of news meta analysis would be dope.
About your historic points specifically, I read that at some point there were local, labor union and citizen sponsored papers in many places in the US and Britain that were not corporate owned, and their customers were the readers and not advertisers; that’s a fundamental difference from most mass media. I’m no expert, my source for this is the intro to Herman/Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, if memory serves.
On the one hand, I agree with the arc of this discussion. I would also like to have better tools for societal information sharing, vetting, collaboration, and truth-seeking.
On the other, I’m not sure I buy the premise that this has gotten worse. Whenever I’ve actually looked back at media from the past, what I find is that past media, both mainstream and fringe, were in many ways even worse in terms of information quality than today (other than maybe the high points within very heavily regulated midcentury broadcast TV, which enforced something of a monocultural baseline set of facts, but even then I’m not sure how much of that is a side effect of which broadcasts have been recorded and popularized decades later).
And if I go back further to before broadcasts and newspapers, life was full of conspiracy theories that everyone believed. For much of history politics really was a matter of powerful conspirators making inscrutable decisions and enforcing them on everyone else. The non-human rest of the world was mostly a mystery, people made up powerful supernatural conspirators they imagined were deciding everything, and almost no one thought there was anything wrong with that.
Right on. I’m sure there’s a sense in which you’re right; I’m not a historian, but history is full of counterexamples so we both have a partial picture probably. All I can say for sure is that as a person living in 2025, our media is problematic in a unique way. The amount of social media news consumed is at an all-time high, and social media is on average less accurate about facts than professional news. What’s ironic is that the internet and related communication tech means there really is a huge potential for democratic, productive media; more than any other time in history. I feel like the increase in information people get means that they understand, at least, that they should be critical of news media, and channeling that criticism into a forum of news meta analysis would be dope.
About your historic points specifically, I read that at some point there were local, labor union and citizen sponsored papers in many places in the US and Britain that were not corporate owned, and their customers were the readers and not advertisers; that’s a fundamental difference from most mass media. I’m no expert, my source for this is the intro to Herman/Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, if memory serves.