When people talk about the days of mass media in the form of the evening news, Dan Rather, everyone "on the same page" with wistful longing... I get why. The current landscape is chaotic.
But, that period of more centralized media left a lot of people out. It made certain perspectives impossible to contemplate.
Like during the early days of the Gulf War: the antiwar movement was invisible.
@futurebird As a kid in the 80s, I remember being confused about how many wars I'd hear about, and how nobody ever explained why they happened. Panama was the first one; the way it was reported was no different than a hurricane. The first Gulf War was similar. It wouldn't be until much later that I realized that most adults also did not know why these things were happening.
That is what a highly centralized media environment is like.
@llewelly This used to be an easy question. I’d say bring on the new! bring on the chaos! But, with the way money can dominate the current landscape— and with how easily people can be manipulated— I don’t know if we have enough safe guards to make this new landscape safe from spiraling into right wing extremism.
I liked it when things like evolution and basic tolerance (not even anti-racism, just tolerance) were “cannon” for a shared national reality.
@futurebird 1/8
on evolution: I read essays and books of Gould and others at what seems, in retrospect, a very young age. And yet I grew up around many people who rejected evolution. The few who "accepted" it thought of evolution purely in terms of the outdated "Great Chain of Being" concept that Gould criticized so frequently. And in those days, any scicom that wasn't aerospace or physics adjacent wasn't especially popular.
@futurebird@llewelly ...I suppose the limited-bandwidth, three-networks model also has the problem of everything being dependent on limited points of failure--lots of sensible things COULD be "canon" for the shared reality, but it also means that a tyrannical regime could find it easier to flip that and make the canon be anything they want.
Whereas the primary mode of attack in the media reality we have now seems to be not to suppress the truth but to bury it in a flood of nonsense. In that sense it's more like pamphleteering in the old days than like TV.
@futurebird I also often think about the (sometimes) false trust that's created in these vacuums.
It's easier to be the "voice of the radio" or "voice of the nation" or whatever if you're one of very few speaking, and if you're receiving significantly limited criticism compared to today's media apparatus.
Yup. The difference between things posted about Ferguson from people who were there were vastly different from the mainstream media when they finally acknowledged it.
@futurebird true. In 1991, a group I was in, in SF, organized a rally outside a TV station to demand coverage after it decided not to cover a series of 100,000 person marches against the war. It had little impact. People need to understand how much better we have it today.
They literally called all the protestors "terrorists" or "terrorist supporters" after 9/11
Just thinking back on the absurdity of that claim and how well it worked. I mean the same things can keep happening, but it was wild how such a thing claim worked.
@futurebird even worse, the guns & drugs exchanges, the corporate takeovers of central & so am democracies, the industrial poisoning of us black communities, etc, all were left out of the polished evening news.
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