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The polity was fractured like this before TV and radio. Mostly the lesson over time has been that people don’t want to agree about anything with their rivals u
by sunir 8y ago
The polity was fractured like this before TV and radio.
Mostly the lesson over time has been that people don’t want to agree about anything with their rivals until absolutely forced to. The content of the argument is less important than the medium of argument.
Network TV didn’t create a realm of common facts exactly but a single forcing factor that compelled resolution because the system could not sustain a lot of competing ideas.
Of course this meant that better ideas would survive, and that very often meant good ideas that worked in reality—-though not always.
Now you have to show an idea is better by implementing it at a smaller scale and growing it rather than winning all at once at a national level.
It’s all doable but it is harder and takes longer. It is possibly lower risk and more dynamic.
- randallsquared 8y ago> The polity was fractured like this before TV and radio. But it wasn't felt. Before TV and radio, the main method of communication was print and conversation, so that a random person picked out of a population might come in contact with only a few political or cultural opinions in a given day. This continued into the age of TV and radio because only a few such opinions were permitted by those controlling the broadcasts. Now that people might easily come into conflict culturally or politically hundreds of times a day, the real diversity of opinion across a large population is apparent to a given member of that population, in a way that it wasn't before, even if we assume that the differences were really there. That constant conflict is a few clicks away at any moment leads many people to internalize that they are constantly fighting for their ability to hold their political beliefs and perform their culture, and/or to shut out most large differences to the extent they can, while conforming themselves to minor differences. The only people who experienced this kind of constant churn in the past were travelers, and mostly only while traveling. We are all travelers now.
- sunir 8y agoThey had general strikes and civil wars and riots. I think it was felt. With blood.
- randallsquared 8y agoYou can have all those with just two sides. The difference now is that the attempt to corral all views into two main camps is breaking down, revealing the chaos of the actual landscape of opinions.
- sunir 8y agoThis analysis doesn’t fit history.