8 ms·

I hate how it feels like there's such a "collective narrative" for everything now days with the internet. Whenever I talk to people about recent news stories i

I hate how it feels like there's such a "collective narrative" for everything now days with the internet. Whenever I talk to people about recent news stories in real life it feels like everyone is just repeating talking points they read online. Its like we've been absorbed into the internet consciousness and talking to a person is like talking to "the internet brain".

dougmwne 5y ago
Thanks for speaking this out loud. I've been feeling the same thing. What's weird is I've been having identical conversations with people from multiple US states and several European countries. There used to be an enormous gap between people from different areas and countries, each existing in their own cultural bubble. Now that's changed, and I'm not talking about "closer" I'm talking "the exact same." Our opinions have always been easily shaped by the media, mass entertainment and political campaigning. But lately it seems like there's less an ocean of information and more like a small puddle we're all trying to drink from at once. At the same time, the Overton Window seems to be slamming shut. I have been suspecting this has all been a dress rehearsal for the societal changes that are coming soon to address climate change, a sort of "powering up" of the collective consciousness.
- nfoz 5y ago
  I agree and have experienced what you wrote, except I have no idea what your last paragraph means. What are you referring to / talking about? It feels like maybe an example of the phenomenon we're talking about lol
  - dougmwne 5y ago
    What I mean is to really address climate change all 8 billion of us are going to have to come together and make huge changes to our lives and each make personal sacrifices for the greater good. There will be new government mandates and it will affect how we live and work. There will be a huge social pressure to conform and a huge backlash. But we will have no choice because our environment will have changed to be more dangerous to our survival. Sounds a bit like the last year, doesn't it?
    - ianai 5y ago
      Society definitely needs to learn the internet is not the end all and be all. Take it with a large grain of salt unless you’re literally reading peer reviewed articles from reputable sources. Or it’s like a cooking recipe that you can verify for yourself and the stakes of being wrong are low. Even news should only be taken as a springboard for what’s going on.
    - skinkestek 5y ago
      Please take all that with a grain of salt everyone: comments like this is for me a good signal that this whole climate change thing is just a front for something else. Please note: I have no shares in fossil companies, I work for railway companies, I buy my stuff used and reuse and sort waste so much my wife gets crazy. So I'm almost there already but for other reasons: I belive in ecology. Not wasting wildlife areas. Not polluting. Climate? Anthropogenic changes? Look at a globe. Put your fingers at the oil fields. Then think that all CO2 from these fields has to be spread out thin across the whole rest of the globe. Or do something else: try to ask someone about some real numbers. I've been interested in those numbers. I never get any numbers. I get dismissed rudely for using the "Just Asking Questions" tactic, a tactic I didn't know until I was told that I used it. The only number I get is 2500 infallible scientists and as far as I now know a fair number of them weren't scientists but authors etc.
      - ryanwaggoner 5y ago
        https://www.ipcc.ch/ https://www.ipcc.ch/
- pessimizer 5y ago
  There used to be a lot of media, with a lot of different motivations. Now there are only a couple of major companies running most of it, and a small number of sources that everyone else rewrites.
SCUSKU 5y ago
Absolutely. Discussion with friends about the goings ons of the world frequently just turns into taking turns regurgitating what we can recall from NPR and NYT's The Daily.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- asdff 5y ago
  It's ironic to even call those experiences discussions when no new ideas are exchanged. It's just people of the same worldview taking turns chanting verses of their creed. Nothing learned nor imparted.
- seattle_spring 5y ago
  What sources would you recommend instead?
  - dqv 5y ago
    All of them. Even the ones of your enemies. Sometimes you need to know the other side’s angle to understand if you’re unknowingly biased.
    - hanselot 5y ago
      How else do you train your spam filter?
    - seattle_spring 5y ago
      Totally. Here's the thing: 95% of the time I see someone argue what you're arguing online, it's from someone who only believes completely false news sources (rather than biased).
      - jkhdigital 5y ago
        How do you know they are false? And completely false, at that? Just asking.
asdff 5y ago
People stopped reading the source material, and started just parroting the talking points. It's even gotten to the point where people are even convinced the talking points are the source material.
- swader999 5y ago
  There's very little real reporting. Most of it is regurgitation of one source article for any given story. Very often that source article is fabricated for a purpose.
  - xbar 5y ago
    The Washington Post and New York Times articles cited suggest that there is even less reporting than some think.
- remarkEon 5y ago
  My shit test for "is this article likely a bunch of FUD or just outright BS" is if they actually link to the source material. If they don't, I usually continue reading it but make a mental note that they're likely pushing some specific version of the event or facts in question.
  - christophilus 5y ago
    It’s challenging to do this without being swayed— particularly if the writer is a good rhetorician. Listening to propaganda over and over again, even while knowing that it is propaganda, tends to influence your opinions. I don’t know what the solution to that is. But it does feel like reading the news requires a mental rigor that is both rare and exhausting. Someone recommended that I supplement my news reading with newsprint from 20 years ago, just to get perspective on what matters and what doesn’t, and on how full of crap most of it is.
    - remarkEon 5y ago
      Yeah, no disagreement from me. It's the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect at scale. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnesiaEffect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...
seattle_spring 5y ago
> Whenever I talk to people about recent news stories in real life it feels like everyone is just repeating talking points they read online. Would you mind sharing some examples, as well as the counterpoint arguments you add to the real life conversation? I've seen claims like this before, and it almost always comes from people who get their news from places like Zerohedge or Infowars.
- toiletfuneral 5y ago
  Yeah I’m curious too..like do people remember a time when everyone formed unique and contrasting views about national subjects they didn’t personally have in depth domain knowledge of? Whats the expectation here?
  - krrrh 5y ago
    It's an interesting question because there has been a dominant narrative that back when there were only 3 channels and everyone trusted what Walter Cronkite said there was a lot more consensus. That was true in the sense that centre-left and centre-right points of view were expressed on all networks (by law because of the fairness doctrine), also because the cold war gave a broad framework for crafting a consensus within, consolidation of newspapers left only 1 or 2 major newspapers in most markets, and because the two parties were each much more ideologically diverse. There was a consensus, but it bounced around the centre, and on topics where there were large disagreements usually you could still count on people to at least be able to articulate the countering sides' views and why someone might hold them. There was a greater appetite for trying to figure out an issue by hearing the best arguments from the other side (watch old episodes of Firing Line on YouTube to get an idea of how it was). When climate change first became an issue in the late eighties there were a wide range of opinions on it, even though people had no more expertise on the subject than they do now. But people had less confidence that their views were right and people with contrasting views were deplorable or had a secret agenda. Even in early naughts Gingrich and Pelosi did a commercial together about how it was an important issue [0], even though there were pro-growth republicans who didn't want to take action, and pro-labour democrats who wanted to preserve working class jobs that disagreed with them. It was more common to see someone's opinion move in the course of a conversation because the culture war lines weren't so sharply defined. Politicians also had less to gain by exploiting divisions because the structure of the political system rewarded politicians who could pull voters over the centre line instead of just firing up the base. More than anything it was more acceptable to have heterodox views. You could be a pro-choice republican or pro-life democrat because on the balance you had more things in common with the party of you choice than you didn't. Did everyone have quixotic or unique views? No, but you didn't have to self-censor as often if you did. It was a lot easier to be intellectually curious and learn things from others. The theory at the time was that the 500 channel universe and the internet would break the old consensus and there would be a whole universe of opinions available. But it seems that "the big sort", the weakening of the parties and strengthening of PACs through campaign finance reform, the modern primary system and how it allows activists to influence and take over the parties (which is really only 40 years old), filter bubbles and people discovering that they prefer not to read stuff they disagree with, and algorithmic newsfeeds that optimize for engagement (ie outrage and out-group homogenization)... all of that has formed 2 consensuses that are more doctrinaire because they are so clustered apart from each other. It's increasingly uncommon for people to have many or any friends with different political ideologies than them. 50 years ago a majority of Americans said they would not be ok with their child marrying outside of their race now the vast majority are ok with it, but inter political marriage is the exact opposite with it becoming increasingly uncommon and socially unacceptable. I tried to follow a range of non-political commentators over the last year, and always thought that lab leak was a hypothesis that couldn't be ruled out given what we know, but made a zoom birthday call go silent when I voiced that opinion because everyone on it was sure that only a right wing loon could consider such a thing. While there was persistent coverage of the hypothesis in alternate media like the Dark Horse podcast, and posts on medium by postdocs sticking their necks out, the liberal media seems to have committed epistemic closure on the topic, with the NY Times COVID reporter just yesterday bemoaned the hypothesis's "racist roots" [1] (despite, as Greenwald points out, that the wet market theory sounded a lot more racist than a mistake at an NIH funded lab). Even the NY Times' previous COVID reporter tried to excuse his blind spot by falsely claiming that the hypothesis was confined to right wing kooks. [2] Of course it's no more racist to blame the pandemic on a mistake made at an NIH funded lab than to blame it on wet markets, but once the lines were drawn it was more important to score short term points against the other side and never admit that someone like Tom Cotton, might have made a reasonable point. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qi6n_-wB154 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qi6n_-wB154 [1] And the fact that she calls it a "theory" should discredit her as a science reporter https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1397623499888463872 https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1397623499888463872 [2] https://donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-lab-leak-theory-f4f88446b04d https://donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com/how-i-learned-to-stop...
99_00 5y ago
"everyone is just repeating talking points they read online" The collective narrative has existed in other media for as long as I've been alive. It's now invaded the internet. People have always listened to the radio, watched cable news, read magazines to get talking points so they can repeat them and appear well informed and intelligent. To look good in front of others and convey status. People who counter the narrative are seen as low status, conspiracy theorists, cranks, disagreeable. My advice to anyone is to just repeat the narrative. I haven't and I have suffered. In the end, no one will remember that you were right. It's not worth it. Keep your contrary opinions to yourself or share them anonymous online, take positions to make money when you are proven right, but don't declare it. Unless your business is being counter narrative. It's been a while but I think the chapter “WHAT MAKES A MESSAGE REPEATABLE? Techniques to Convince Others to Repeat Your Words” from the book “Impossible to Ignore.” by Carmen Simon discusses the science of how to make this happen.
- the_optimist 5y ago
  This has been a horrifically sad accepted reality of US higher education for a generation. Students are easily-influenced, naive, and economically vulnerable.
  - 99_00 5y ago
    I suspect it's a universal human characteristic.
rufus_foreman 5y ago
They're scared they might say something wrong and get fired, shamed, and ex-communicated. Who isn't? The people that answered "I'm not" to that question, those people are the problem. Let's get them fired, shamed, and ex-communicated.
- BigJono 5y ago
  I might believe that more if all the people I know IRL who talk about being afraid of being fired/cancelled/whatever weren't also the exact same people shitting out talking point after talking point from the exact same news sources with no critical thought whatsoever.
  - rufus_foreman 5y ago
    So can't they do that and still work a job? Or what else, if they can't? They starve? Or I have to go to work and provide them food? What exactly is your plan here?
aasasd 5y ago
Perhaps because the proper honest statement that vast majority of people can make is ‘I have no clue about any of this’.
- mistermann 5y ago
  To honestly make that statement, it would first require conscious awareness of it. I believe that this is the root problem: people, even smart people, are literally unable to realize that they do not know under certain conditions. On certain topics (fight or flight mode?), it's like the mind stops supporting trinary logic and downgrades to binary only. Consider this: how frequently do you find the logical styles so common in this thread in threads where the topic is technology or things of that sort?
simonsarris 5y ago
I think it's an unfortunate effect of mass media. If anything however I think the internet made it 1% better, not worse. I wrote about the change from a world of actual dialogue to one of mass media, here: https://simonsarris.substack.com/p/are-we-still-thinking https://simonsarris.substack.com/p/are-we-still-thinking
dotcommand 5y ago
Isn't that how it's always been. People just regurgitate the media they consume. It used to be sermons at church. Then it moved to print, radio and tv. Now it expanded to the internet/social media. Whether we like it or not, we've all been programmed by the media that we consume. "Whoever controls the media controls the mind" - Jim Morrison
tootie 5y ago
This isn't a "now" thing. Most people and even most policy makers can't fully digest such complicated topics so they rely on people they trust.
gred 5y ago
The extinction of species and even languages triggers mass self-examination. But entire cultures are currently evolving at a speed and in a direction that will essentially lead to their extinction within two or three generations, and few people are mourning the loss yet. Human nature being what it is, my unborn American great-grandson will feel he has little in common with any randomly-chosen Cambodian of his time, but the truth is that they'll listen to the same music, play the same video games, watch the same movies, argue across the same political spectrum, speak the same language, and get their education and news from an elite that is even more globally homogeneous than they are.
Impassionata 5y ago
It has always been like this. Everyone always repeated talking points they heard in the mainstream media. Always.

dougmwne 5y ago

Thanks for speaking this out loud. I've been feeling the same thing. What's weird is I've been having identical conversations with people from multiple US states and several European countries. There used to be an enormous gap between people from different areas and countries, each existing in their own cultural bubble. Now that's changed, and I'm not talking about "closer" I'm talking "the exact same." Our opinions have always been easily shaped by the media, mass entertainment and political campaigning. But lately it seems like there's less an ocean of information and more like a small puddle we're all trying to drink from at once. At the same time, the Overton Window seems to be slamming shut. I have been suspecting this has all been a dress rehearsal for the societal changes that are coming soon to address climate change, a sort of "powering up" of the collective consciousness.

nfoz 5y ago
I agree and have experienced what you wrote, except I have no idea what your last paragraph means. What are you referring to / talking about? It feels like maybe an example of the phenomenon we're talking about lol
- dougmwne 5y ago
  What I mean is to really address climate change all 8 billion of us are going to have to come together and make huge changes to our lives and each make personal sacrifices for the greater good. There will be new government mandates and it will affect how we live and work. There will be a huge social pressure to conform and a huge backlash. But we will have no choice because our environment will have changed to be more dangerous to our survival. Sounds a bit like the last year, doesn't it?
  - ianai 5y ago
    Society definitely needs to learn the internet is not the end all and be all. Take it with a large grain of salt unless you’re literally reading peer reviewed articles from reputable sources. Or it’s like a cooking recipe that you can verify for yourself and the stakes of being wrong are low. Even news should only be taken as a springboard for what’s going on.
  - skinkestek 5y ago
    Please take all that with a grain of salt everyone: comments like this is for me a good signal that this whole climate change thing is just a front for something else. Please note: I have no shares in fossil companies, I work for railway companies, I buy my stuff used and reuse and sort waste so much my wife gets crazy. So I'm almost there already but for other reasons: I belive in ecology. Not wasting wildlife areas. Not polluting. Climate? Anthropogenic changes? Look at a globe. Put your fingers at the oil fields. Then think that all CO2 from these fields has to be spread out thin across the whole rest of the globe. Or do something else: try to ask someone about some real numbers. I've been interested in those numbers. I never get any numbers. I get dismissed rudely for using the "Just Asking Questions" tactic, a tactic I didn't know until I was told that I used it. The only number I get is 2500 infallible scientists and as far as I now know a fair number of them weren't scientists but authors etc.
    - ryanwaggoner 5y ago
      https://www.ipcc.ch/ https://www.ipcc.ch/
pessimizer 5y ago
There used to be a lot of media, with a lot of different motivations. Now there are only a couple of major companies running most of it, and a small number of sources that everyone else rewrites.

SCUSKU 5y ago

Absolutely. Discussion with friends about the goings ons of the world frequently just turns into taking turns regurgitating what we can recall from NPR and NYT's The Daily.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
asdff 5y ago
It's ironic to even call those experiences discussions when no new ideas are exchanged. It's just people of the same worldview taking turns chanting verses of their creed. Nothing learned nor imparted.
seattle_spring 5y ago
What sources would you recommend instead?
- dqv 5y ago
  All of them. Even the ones of your enemies. Sometimes you need to know the other side’s angle to understand if you’re unknowingly biased.
  - hanselot 5y ago
    How else do you train your spam filter?
  - seattle_spring 5y ago
    Totally. Here's the thing: 95% of the time I see someone argue what you're arguing online, it's from someone who only believes completely false news sources (rather than biased).
    - jkhdigital 5y ago
      How do you know they are false? And completely false, at that? Just asking.

asdff 5y ago

People stopped reading the source material, and started just parroting the talking points. It's even gotten to the point where people are even convinced the talking points are the source material.

swader999 5y ago
There's very little real reporting. Most of it is regurgitation of one source article for any given story. Very often that source article is fabricated for a purpose.
- xbar 5y ago
  The Washington Post and New York Times articles cited suggest that there is even less reporting than some think.
remarkEon 5y ago
My shit test for "is this article likely a bunch of FUD or just outright BS" is if they actually link to the source material. If they don't, I usually continue reading it but make a mental note that they're likely pushing some specific version of the event or facts in question.
- christophilus 5y ago
  It’s challenging to do this without being swayed— particularly if the writer is a good rhetorician. Listening to propaganda over and over again, even while knowing that it is propaganda, tends to influence your opinions. I don’t know what the solution to that is. But it does feel like reading the news requires a mental rigor that is both rare and exhausting. Someone recommended that I supplement my news reading with newsprint from 20 years ago, just to get perspective on what matters and what doesn’t, and on how full of crap most of it is.
  - remarkEon 5y ago
    Yeah, no disagreement from me. It's the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect at scale. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnesiaEffect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...

seattle_spring 5y ago

> Whenever I talk to people about recent news stories in real life it feels like everyone is just repeating talking points they read online. Would you mind sharing some examples, as well as the counterpoint arguments you add to the real life conversation? I've seen claims like this before, and it almost always comes from people who get their news from places like Zerohedge or Infowars.

toiletfuneral 5y ago
Yeah I’m curious too..like do people remember a time when everyone formed unique and contrasting views about national subjects they didn’t personally have in depth domain knowledge of? Whats the expectation here?
- krrrh 5y ago
  It's an interesting question because there has been a dominant narrative that back when there were only 3 channels and everyone trusted what Walter Cronkite said there was a lot more consensus. That was true in the sense that centre-left and centre-right points of view were expressed on all networks (by law because of the fairness doctrine), also because the cold war gave a broad framework for crafting a consensus within, consolidation of newspapers left only 1 or 2 major newspapers in most markets, and because the two parties were each much more ideologically diverse. There was a consensus, but it bounced around the centre, and on topics where there were large disagreements usually you could still count on people to at least be able to articulate the countering sides' views and why someone might hold them. There was a greater appetite for trying to figure out an issue by hearing the best arguments from the other side (watch old episodes of Firing Line on YouTube to get an idea of how it was). When climate change first became an issue in the late eighties there were a wide range of opinions on it, even though people had no more expertise on the subject than they do now. But people had less confidence that their views were right and people with contrasting views were deplorable or had a secret agenda. Even in early naughts Gingrich and Pelosi did a commercial together about how it was an important issue [0], even though there were pro-growth republicans who didn't want to take action, and pro-labour democrats who wanted to preserve working class jobs that disagreed with them. It was more common to see someone's opinion move in the course of a conversation because the culture war lines weren't so sharply defined. Politicians also had less to gain by exploiting divisions because the structure of the political system rewarded politicians who could pull voters over the centre line instead of just firing up the base. More than anything it was more acceptable to have heterodox views. You could be a pro-choice republican or pro-life democrat because on the balance you had more things in common with the party of you choice than you didn't. Did everyone have quixotic or unique views? No, but you didn't have to self-censor as often if you did. It was a lot easier to be intellectually curious and learn things from others. The theory at the time was that the 500 channel universe and the internet would break the old consensus and there would be a whole universe of opinions available. But it seems that "the big sort", the weakening of the parties and strengthening of PACs through campaign finance reform, the modern primary system and how it allows activists to influence and take over the parties (which is really only 40 years old), filter bubbles and people discovering that they prefer not to read stuff they disagree with, and algorithmic newsfeeds that optimize for engagement (ie outrage and out-group homogenization)... all of that has formed 2 consensuses that are more doctrinaire because they are so clustered apart from each other. It's increasingly uncommon for people to have many or any friends with different political ideologies than them. 50 years ago a majority of Americans said they would not be ok with their child marrying outside of their race now the vast majority are ok with it, but inter political marriage is the exact opposite with it becoming increasingly uncommon and socially unacceptable. I tried to follow a range of non-political commentators over the last year, and always thought that lab leak was a hypothesis that couldn't be ruled out given what we know, but made a zoom birthday call go silent when I voiced that opinion because everyone on it was sure that only a right wing loon could consider such a thing. While there was persistent coverage of the hypothesis in alternate media like the Dark Horse podcast, and posts on medium by postdocs sticking their necks out, the liberal media seems to have committed epistemic closure on the topic, with the NY Times COVID reporter just yesterday bemoaned the hypothesis's "racist roots" [1] (despite, as Greenwald points out, that the wet market theory sounded a lot more racist than a mistake at an NIH funded lab). Even the NY Times' previous COVID reporter tried to excuse his blind spot by falsely claiming that the hypothesis was confined to right wing kooks. [2] Of course it's no more racist to blame the pandemic on a mistake made at an NIH funded lab than to blame it on wet markets, but once the lines were drawn it was more important to score short term points against the other side and never admit that someone like Tom Cotton, might have made a reasonable point. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qi6n_-wB154 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qi6n_-wB154 [1] And the fact that she calls it a "theory" should discredit her as a science reporter https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1397623499888463872 https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1397623499888463872 [2] https://donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-lab-leak-theory-f4f88446b04d https://donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com/how-i-learned-to-stop...

99_00 5y ago

"everyone is just repeating talking points they read online" The collective narrative has existed in other media for as long as I've been alive. It's now invaded the internet. People have always listened to the radio, watched cable news, read magazines to get talking points so they can repeat them and appear well informed and intelligent. To look good in front of others and convey status. People who counter the narrative are seen as low status, conspiracy theorists, cranks, disagreeable. My advice to anyone is to just repeat the narrative. I haven't and I have suffered. In the end, no one will remember that you were right. It's not worth it. Keep your contrary opinions to yourself or share them anonymous online, take positions to make money when you are proven right, but don't declare it. Unless your business is being counter narrative. It's been a while but I think the chapter “WHAT MAKES A MESSAGE REPEATABLE? Techniques to Convince Others to Repeat Your Words” from the book “Impossible to Ignore.” by Carmen Simon discusses the science of how to make this happen.

the_optimist 5y ago
This has been a horrifically sad accepted reality of US higher education for a generation. Students are easily-influenced, naive, and economically vulnerable.
- 99_00 5y ago
  I suspect it's a universal human characteristic.

rufus_foreman 5y ago

They're scared they might say something wrong and get fired, shamed, and ex-communicated. Who isn't? The people that answered "I'm not" to that question, those people are the problem. Let's get them fired, shamed, and ex-communicated.

BigJono 5y ago
I might believe that more if all the people I know IRL who talk about being afraid of being fired/cancelled/whatever weren't also the exact same people shitting out talking point after talking point from the exact same news sources with no critical thought whatsoever.
- rufus_foreman 5y ago
  So can't they do that and still work a job? Or what else, if they can't? They starve? Or I have to go to work and provide them food? What exactly is your plan here?

aasasd 5y ago

Perhaps because the proper honest statement that vast majority of people can make is ‘I have no clue about any of this’.

mistermann 5y ago
To honestly make that statement, it would first require conscious awareness of it. I believe that this is the root problem: people, even smart people, are literally unable to realize that they do not know under certain conditions. On certain topics (fight or flight mode?), it's like the mind stops supporting trinary logic and downgrades to binary only. Consider this: how frequently do you find the logical styles so common in this thread in threads where the topic is technology or things of that sort?

simonsarris 5y ago

I think it's an unfortunate effect of mass media. If anything however I think the internet made it 1% better, not worse. I wrote about the change from a world of actual dialogue to one of mass media, here: https://simonsarris.substack.com/p/are-we-still-thinking https://simonsarris.substack.com/p/are-we-still-thinking

dotcommand 5y ago

Isn't that how it's always been. People just regurgitate the media they consume. It used to be sermons at church. Then it moved to print, radio and tv. Now it expanded to the internet/social media. Whether we like it or not, we've all been programmed by the media that we consume. "Whoever controls the media controls the mind" - Jim Morrison

tootie 5y ago

This isn't a "now" thing. Most people and even most policy makers can't fully digest such complicated topics so they rely on people they trust.

gred 5y ago

The extinction of species and even languages triggers mass self-examination. But entire cultures are currently evolving at a speed and in a direction that will essentially lead to their extinction within two or three generations, and few people are mourning the loss yet. Human nature being what it is, my unborn American great-grandson will feel he has little in common with any randomly-chosen Cambodian of his time, but the truth is that they'll listen to the same music, play the same video games, watch the same movies, argue across the same political spectrum, speak the same language, and get their education and news from an elite that is even more globally homogeneous than they are.

Impassionata 5y ago

It has always been like this. Everyone always repeated talking points they heard in the mainstream media. Always.