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Is the is very different to what newspapers were when they first appeared? Of course they never achieved the same technological pace. Also, nowadays, when you

Is the is very different to what newspapers were when they first appeared? Of course they never achieved the same technological pace. Also, nowadays, when you think of newspapers, you think mostly of quality publications, writing considered, contextualised pieces. But even nowadays, there are plenty of crappy tabloids chasing ad revenue (clicks?), with no regard for information and only about the shock factor. And in the past it was much worse, since the whole cesspit of attention-grabbing was contained in newspapers and pamphlets. Tech changes, humans don’t.

Dumblydorr 5y ago
While I agree printed media is biased and is a medium for propaganda, it's hard to argue it's comparable in scale or effectiveness to social media. 1) in the Renaissance, literacy was much lower, books were scarce and expensive, and writing was often made in Latin, like the original bibles and Newton's Principia Mathematica. Therefore, print had MUCH less reach than social media. 2) the attentional cost of a book is vastly greater than a tweet. Tweets are designed to be simple and read in seconds; books are often complex and take weeks to digest. 3) due to 2, I feel Twitter's discourse evolves and devolves much, much faster into extremism and bullying and bad behaviors. It takes a long time for book disses to reach their target, not so for Twitter. I could go on, but suffice to say, social media is an exponential notch above printed media in it's potential misuse and damage to society.
- hadlock 5y ago
  A lot of printed media was released in poorly bound booklets, without covers, it was roughly equivalent to a tweet or blog post today. The good ones got reprinted and/or compiled into an anthology, the bad ones were simply lost to time as kindling for the hearth. Not as fast as a tweet, but low cost, sub-book media has existed as long as the printing press was around. The classic books we study today are the equivalent of the criterion collection dvd sets.
wutbrodo 5y ago
> Also, nowadays, when you think of newspapers, you think mostly of quality publications, writing considered, contextualised pieces. This is a very unique perspective. It's one I don't share, and neither do the majority of Americans[1]. The economic and cultural forces shaping journalism make it so that it's vanishingly rare to find pieces that meet (my personal bar for) "considered, contextualized pieces". It's been a decade since the world of blogs/independent publishing has been an infinitely better source for that type of writing than traditional media has. Naturally, independent publishing is also where you go to find the absolute worst of analysis and reporting, to a degree that traditional media would never stoop to. The core problem is that of discovery, finding the subset of high-quality sources in the acres of chaff that is the modern news environment. It turns out that aggregators like Twitter are amazing for this, for those with the mental maturity and cognitive ability to use them with discipline. It's not very difficult to start with a trusted core of intellectually honest follows, then iteratively (and hyper-selectively) add high-quality accounts/author that you find through your existing follows. You have to be okay with a sparse feed to start, and you have to be disciplined enough to recognize perspectives that are high-quality even if you disagree with them, but it's an extremely straightforward path towards a much better media diet than the vast majority of people. Note that this process doesn't disadvantage traditional media; it just fails to give it an undue advantage. Traditional publications and individual journalists within them can be treated like a source like any other, that can be compared to In practice, this is nominal only: in my experience, the incentives of the industry are such that 99% of them fall massively short of the basic quality and intellectual honesty bar. (Seriously, try it: start checking the sources and reading the papers cited by every article you read from eg the NYT and see how long you maintain confidence in modeling them as basically intelligent people telling you what's basically the truth). [1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/355526/americans-trust-media-dips-second-lowest-record.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/355526/americans-trust-media-di...

Dumblydorr 5y ago

While I agree printed media is biased and is a medium for propaganda, it's hard to argue it's comparable in scale or effectiveness to social media. 1) in the Renaissance, literacy was much lower, books were scarce and expensive, and writing was often made in Latin, like the original bibles and Newton's Principia Mathematica. Therefore, print had MUCH less reach than social media. 2) the attentional cost of a book is vastly greater than a tweet. Tweets are designed to be simple and read in seconds; books are often complex and take weeks to digest. 3) due to 2, I feel Twitter's discourse evolves and devolves much, much faster into extremism and bullying and bad behaviors. It takes a long time for book disses to reach their target, not so for Twitter. I could go on, but suffice to say, social media is an exponential notch above printed media in it's potential misuse and damage to society.

hadlock 5y ago
A lot of printed media was released in poorly bound booklets, without covers, it was roughly equivalent to a tweet or blog post today. The good ones got reprinted and/or compiled into an anthology, the bad ones were simply lost to time as kindling for the hearth. Not as fast as a tweet, but low cost, sub-book media has existed as long as the printing press was around. The classic books we study today are the equivalent of the criterion collection dvd sets.

wutbrodo 5y ago

> Also, nowadays, when you think of newspapers, you think mostly of quality publications, writing considered, contextualised pieces. This is a very unique perspective. It's one I don't share, and neither do the majority of Americans[1]. The economic and cultural forces shaping journalism make it so that it's vanishingly rare to find pieces that meet (my personal bar for) "considered, contextualized pieces". It's been a decade since the world of blogs/independent publishing has been an infinitely better source for that type of writing than traditional media has. Naturally, independent publishing is also where you go to find the absolute worst of analysis and reporting, to a degree that traditional media would never stoop to. The core problem is that of discovery, finding the subset of high-quality sources in the acres of chaff that is the modern news environment. It turns out that aggregators like Twitter are amazing for this, for those with the mental maturity and cognitive ability to use them with discipline. It's not very difficult to start with a trusted core of intellectually honest follows, then iteratively (and hyper-selectively) add high-quality accounts/author that you find through your existing follows. You have to be okay with a sparse feed to start, and you have to be disciplined enough to recognize perspectives that are high-quality even if you disagree with them, but it's an extremely straightforward path towards a much better media diet than the vast majority of people. Note that this process doesn't disadvantage traditional media; it just fails to give it an undue advantage. Traditional publications and individual journalists within them can be treated like a source like any other, that can be compared to In practice, this is nominal only: in my experience, the incentives of the industry are such that 99% of them fall massively short of the basic quality and intellectual honesty bar. (Seriously, try it: start checking the sources and reading the papers cited by every article you read from eg the NYT and see how long you maintain confidence in modeling them as basically intelligent people telling you what's basically the truth). [1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/355526/americans-trust-media-dips-second-lowest-record.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/355526/americans-trust-media-di...