funinspace
Don't Panic
- Joined
- Mar 1, 2004
- Messages
- 4,204
- Location
- Oregon
- Gender
- Alien
- Basic Beliefs
- functional atheist; theoretical agnostic
I think so.
Before the advent of the computer, you had to write to the newspaper editorials section and hope the newspapers printed your letters about your opinions. Obviously, the newspaper staff would toss any crazy, conspiracy ramblings and only post letters they thought well written and argued.
TV Newsrooms were the same. You could call, but you had to leave a message and hoped they called you back. They were under no obligation to air your views.
Everyday people had no other place to air their views that reached international levels. They could only bitch and complain and talk about government surveillance or being probed by aliens at the local barber shop or pub.
Now, every idiot's opinions can be heard across the nation and a generation is growing up in the US thinking that because everyone has an opinion and is free to air it, that no opinion can be wrong.
There is still a filter. Before it was the editors. Today it is attention. We pay attention to whoever already has attention from other's. I see a danger here. In the first instance the well educated middle class were arbiters of what went in. In the second case it can get really ugly. If enough people pay attention to wrong things we can get a very nasty public discourse.
I think it is more than just a filter of attention. It is also being filtered by association. Before, the internet and even cable TV, one had to go to specialty magazines, clubs, or more unique newspapers to get something outside of the very mainstream major presses. And much of it took either time or at least some money. Cable TV increased the diversification of informational sources. And sure there were oddball small pamphlet publishing’s that strange people read, but it was on the margins.
I like the barber shop or pub analogy. I have said a few times that the internet is like plugging in mics into thousands of bars and recording what people are saying. Though obviously much of it is channeled/filtered better. We have a PR person for a company that tweets something seriously stupid, and arrives in Africa fired. 30 years ago, it would have just been a PR person making the joke to the friend/co-worker next to them…end of story. Today, no bar is needed to share among similar thinking people. Today, redneck evangelicals (I use this example as I have in-laws that we see part of this stupidity thru a shared connection via my wife’s Facebook account) can share Youtube vids, watch podcasts, from their right wing sites that they live within. And now it can be done with very portable pads/phones. I doubt these in-laws even watch any regular national news anymore, but for maybe some Fox News. They probably still see some local news, but wouldn’t bother with a paper. Their informational hubs are now their evangelical church, Tea Party/redneck type paranoid internet sources, pro-gun and grunt pro-military internet sources. My wife actually got into a bit of a spat with her brother, as she pointed out (with evidenced source) that he was just posting an old made up yarn on Facebook that was now being used to slander Pres. Obama. He kind of went hostile, starting off with pointing out with how liberal the media was and you can’t trust them, and it went downhill from there... This idiot brother has a college degree, along with his wife. They have so dumbed down their kids, that so far 3 haven’t bothered with college. Though 1 is working on an associates.
Where was I…I think the stupid has always been there, but I think it gets somewhat amplified by the fact that now vids, tweets, and web posts on social media allow things to remain out there to be seen by more people as much on the internet doesn’t just go away. I’m not sure where this will eventually lead, but I also think that much of the 20th century was a much of an anomaly as anything else. Before that, very little news got to most people. Lots of local rags made up crap with impunity. Ben Franklin used pseudonyms to slander people or push notions that he didn’t necessarily want to be known as by him. I think leaders were far more able to make up stuff and get away with it.
I'm not sure if the world is more extreme or not. I think the duality of the cold war, and the rise of the US as a super power probably dampened what would have been probably a more unstable world (whether that was good or bad). I do think the dominance of the US is waning and we could be shifting into a multi-polar world over the next 10-20 years, and that would increase perceived stability.