9 ms·

Back in the mid 90's as the Internet was starting to become more accessible to the general public, I remember reading an article that made the following point:

Back in the mid 90's as the Internet was starting to become more accessible to the general public, I remember reading an article that made the following point: The telegraph effectively killed many newspapers as everyone moved to newspapers to printed national and global news. That was bad b/c it lowered the options people had for consuming news and dramatically reduced the diversity of ideas and opinions. The Internet was going to do the same to the point that we all read the same big websites and therefore had the same thoughts, opinions etc. <end of the point> I remember reading this and thinking "that kind of makes sense". Revisiting the idea recently, Pandora, YouTube, TikTok etc have all made a business out of building a customized feed for YOU. It's become the exact opposite of what the original article predicted. It's not surprising that we've become so divided when you can "build" your own reality by choosing the information streams that you want to consume. PS In terms of mass media shared experiences, 120 MILLION people watched the series finale of the TV show MASH. Hard to imagine a similar event today.

kingkawn 4y ago
A teenager in my family says that all the kids in her high school have suspiciously similar senses of humor, as though that part of all of them was raised in the same environment; TikTok
pyinstallwoes 4y ago
Well in one way it did work with the original point, the internet has created a centralized pipe for X. There exists not _many youtubes_ there is _one youtube_ and everyone uses that for video. In the beginning of the internet there were _many_ options, but overtime all of these options get cannabalized by a central _service_ for that thing. So yes and yes, which is arguably the closest thing to a matrix, simulacrum view of reality. On top of that we rely ever increasingly on models and statistics as physical laws. Oh woe to the future, for the difference between fact or fiction is irrelevant and blurred.
Swizec 4y ago
We do all go to the same ~10 websites. There are some geographic differences, different sites dominate in different parts of the world. America has an outsized influence that may slowly be slipping. What you couldn’t predict 20 years ago is that those 10 websites are going to have ~personalized feeds for everyone. That was a little surprising … although we’ve been talking about the problem of filter bubbles since at least the mid 2000’s. I remember telling my boss in high school that I’m going to quit so I can go build a Google that doesn’t suffer from the filter bubble problem. Ah youth … Despite all this personalization, a collective conscience remains. Largely influenced by bot armies and professional memers. Look how effectively the news spreads when an american politician does anything. Especially around election season. The whole world knows and can’t get away. And we all know that GOT had a bad ending even if we stopped watching the show after 1 season, for example.
chrisabrams 4y ago
> PS In terms of mass media shared experiences, 120 MILLION people watched the series finale of the TV show MASH. Hard to imagine a similar event today. The Super Bowl numbers will blow your mind then ;)
- THENATHE 4y ago
  For it’s time (meaning relative to the US population at that point) MASH is larger than basically every superbowl ever, except for maybe the last couple. I’m not hip on the current viewership numbers, but literally over half of America watched the series finale of MASH
- DJBunnies 4y ago
  The super bowl that year had ~82 million viewers.
  - anthk 4y ago
    Soccer had 5 billion viewers across the world.
    - throwaway2037 4y ago
      For a single match? This feels like comparing apple to oranges.
      - anthk 4y ago
        Yes.
- lab14 4y ago
  Wait until OP hears about FIFA World Cup viewership.
- kuschku 4y ago
  And Eurovision, with 200 million+ a year even more ;)
- 4y ago
neogodless 4y ago
> The telegraph effectively killed many newspapers as everyone moved to newspapers to printed national and global news Can you confirm there's a typo in here? Do you mean "moved FROM LOCAL newspapers to"?
- imchillyb 4y ago
  His meaning is clear with contextual clues. The telegraph killed local papers that only printed local news.
bombcar 4y ago
The "customized feed for you" is not as unique as you'd expect. It basically is the algorithm fitting you into some number of buckets and then serving you that content. And speaking of shared experiences, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqZsoesa55w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqZsoesa55w has been watched 11 billion times. However, I suspect 10 billion of those may be my kids ...
- magic_hamster 4y ago
  While billions might watch a video on YouTube, it's not truly a shared experience unless it happens at the same time. And at least for me, even with live chat scrolling in the speed of light to the side, it still doesn't feel the same as "Live TV" did. But as I commented elsewhere in the discussion, I still prefer the current experience.
  - nullstyle 4y ago
    I assure you, I can start whistling baby shark and get more people to recognize it than I could if I started whistling the MASH theme. Baby shark is most definitely a shared experience.
    - karmakaze 4y ago
      I've never heard of Baby shark, and watching the video can't recall ever hearing the tune. You may be living in a bubble, or we all are.
      - v-erne 4y ago
        Yeah, bubble called having children. There is not a single child in my daughter class that do not know this song by heart. And I'm sure that it's not like they learned it by randomly surfing web on their own - their parents introduced it to them. It's really bad song but still its good that it provides some shared context for each and every one of them.
        4y ago
SkyBelow 4y ago
>Revisiting the idea recently, Pandora, YouTube, TikTok etc have all made a business out of building a customized feed for YOU. It's become the exact opposite of what the original article predicted. Is that the opposite? If the customized feeds are selected from the same group of sources, we could still see a decrease in total number of sources even though people are more customized. Here is a simplified example. Take the 50 US states. In the past, let's assume each state had 10 news sources. Generally people would only consume 10 news sources so the overlap of source consumption in each state was pretty similar. A person in a single state consumed the same 10 news sources as anyone else in that state. Total sources of news is 500. Then we enter a globalization time. Everyone gets 10 news sources, but they are custom picked for each person. But there is now 1 source per state they are picked form. This gives us (50!/(40!10!) ~ 10 billion, assuming I remember my math correctly) combinations for 10 news sources, plenty enough that each person gets a custom selection of news sources. But the total sources of news is only 50, 1/10th of the previous example. So while each selection is more unique, the total number of captured thoughts and opinions is now 1/10th of what previously existed.
cageface 4y ago
This is the argument Postman makes in "Amusing Ourselves to Death": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death Before the telegram news was predominantly local news and only major news from abroad since it took so long to travel. The telegram made all news globally, instantly available and we were suddenly inundated with information that for the most part we couldn't really act on and had a strong incentive to be as sensational and attention grabbing as possible. Newer media like the radio, television and the internet only accelerated this trend.
magic_hamster 4y ago
Having a show become a massive TV event (like MASH) is nice for solidarity but it comes at a price of having a centralized channel(s) of opinions, messages and agenda. It's a double edged sword but eventually, in my opinion, having a variety of messages available is better than traditional centralized TV. And massive TV events can still happen for something like the next moon landing or sports. The problem isn't with selecting your content, but with the reduced (to none existing) exposure to other content that might challenge your views. We owe it to ourselves to honestly test our beliefs and worldview, see if they hold up, and adjust accordingly. Today it's far too easy to avoid doing this while staying on feeds that reinforce whatever it is you believe in, never challenging you, and becoming radicalized.
- mikkergp 4y ago
  > but with the reduced (to none existing) exposure to other content that might challenge your views. We owe it to ourselves to honestly test our beliefs and worldview, see if they hold up, and adjust accordingly. This sounds good but I actually don’t buy it anymore. I consider myself to be a pretty empathetic person, but over time I’ve realized empathy doesn’t solve any problems unless you’re forced to put your money where your mouth is. Would I work together with a far right conservative on a project towards a shared mission. Of course! Do I understand why conservatives feel the way they do? For the most part yes. But being exposed to far right beliefs just makes me more and more crazy, even if I understand the underlying emotion. Even if I empathize with the underlying pain, sometimes empathy makes those feelings worse. We don’t just disagree on the substance of opinions( pro choice vs pro life) we disagree on the deeper ways of expression, emotion, thought processes and how we assess truth. I understand why someone is pro life but watching the thought processes behind those rants? Helps no one. Sure I love reading a good relatively moderate economist from either side arguing whatever but /r/conservative comment section and caustic twitter threads?
  - throwaway4aday 4y ago
    > being exposed to far right beliefs just makes me more and more crazy > watching the thought processes behind those rants I think, perhaps, the problem stems from only paying attention to people who are making emotional arguments based on ideology or repeated talking points that they don't truly understand but simply feel align with whatever group they see themselves as belonging to. This is the partisanship or tribalism that seems to be poisoning a lot of public discourse. I specifically say discourse here because I don't believe it is actually disrupting society at the interpersonal level as much as popular opinion seems to think it is. With either side, if you examine the well reasoned arguments that underly a lot of the talking points you find that they are often quite different and more nuanced than the things firebrands are turning them into. This is troubling because it means even the people who supposedly believe in these ideas actually don't understand them at all. I think this is responsible for the phenomenon of people turning out to be over all much more centrist and agreeing with each other when they make an effort to sit down and discuss these things in a rational manner. My advice is to shun reddit, YouTube and twitter and instead find some old books that discuss the topics in a rational way from a variety of perspectives, read them and then draw your own conclusions.
Silverback_VII 4y ago
Maybe it is not the "building your own reality" which is the problem but the idea of nation states in which you have to be in a particular reality without a say. It is probably better for humans to live in smaller structures over which they have more control. Concerning the division between liberals and concervatives in the States I think it is interesting to mention that Theodore Kaczynsky has written that the opposing evolution of these two systems(with the money a power they have) may lead to a larger conflict than other systems like Islam. He calls them self-propagating systems which are somewhat organisms on a higher level controlling more or less nodes, which are human brains(and machines nowadays).
agumonkey 4y ago
And it's larger than that. A lot of sentiment floating around is about how things should fit 'me' perfectly. There's an inversion of the "force" of society because we can all try to fulfill our apparent needs without anybody.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
wsinks 4y ago
I used to think that it would be hard to imagine a time where 120 million people watched the same thing at the same time. And then I realized that's an outdated thinking. Here's my example: There are certain ads that get played on campaigns. It's a longer time scale - not everyone is tuning in at the same time. But I've been able to communicated shared suffering over Forward ads to other people that I've met. If I like a similar topic to someone else and we both watch Youtube, then I guarantee they've seen (and hate) the "Toxic Poop Guy". Instantaneous watching was the past. Experiencing the campaign is the now, in my opinion. Sure, maybe not 120 Million people at the same time for a TV show. But it's definitely still out there.
lo_zamoyski 4y ago
The situation is more complex than that, I think. It's possible for some domains to diversity while others homogenize (and I think you are overestimating the diversity of views actually in play). American politics is highly polarized rather than diverse. The mass media are owned by a few large corporations while the internet offers the possibility for greater diversity of views. But possibility does not necessarily translate into actuality. Dethroning a king doesn't automatically mean more liberty. Indeed, the removal of an authority creates a vacuum in which powerful players can now even more successfully dominate than before. Information travels very quickly today, but it must happen over a medium and "signal strength" still matters. Indeed, this speed of transmission can be a force multiplier, inviting less reflection and criticism and more thoughtless reaction. We must view things systemically. The world today isn't the world of 2001 plus some new stuff, like Lego bricks tacked onto an existing edifice that otherwise remains the same. New things shape the world they enter into. Once the internet, social media, etc. entered the picture, they also affected everybody and thus the system as a whole, adapting and changing in response. It is true that the establishment can no longer exercise control over popular thought and sentiment using the exactly same traditional 20th century methods of broadcasting propaganda thought restricted channels, but new methods exist. And it's important to understand that today as well as decades ago, the less powerful often ape the more powerful. Chomsky talks about this in "Manufacturing Consent". There's your trickle down theory of propaganda. So I'm of the opinion that things are changing, the pot is being stirred and bubbling, but there's a great deal that remains the same under new guises.
pdpi 4y ago
> Revisiting the idea recently, Pandora, YouTube, TikTok etc have all made a business out of building a customized feed for YOU. It's become the exact opposite of what the original article predicted. Reality is even worse than that, what you actually get is an unholy marriage of both. A highly customised feed built out of content plucked from a small number of highly homogenised sources.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ssss11 4y ago
And in many cases YOU don’t actually choose - these ‘smart’ (read: stupid) algorithms infer what you want to see. I hate that. I think we will look back on this period in dunbfoundedness at what we allowed big tech to do.
shreyshnaccount 4y ago
media has also become asynchronous, and streaming has made a metric like live audience lose some of its meaning and should be replaced with launch week or month views?

kingkawn 4y ago

A teenager in my family says that all the kids in her high school have suspiciously similar senses of humor, as though that part of all of them was raised in the same environment; TikTok

pyinstallwoes 4y ago

Well in one way it did work with the original point, the internet has created a centralized pipe for X. There exists not _many youtubes_ there is _one youtube_ and everyone uses that for video. In the beginning of the internet there were _many_ options, but overtime all of these options get cannabalized by a central _service_ for that thing. So yes and yes, which is arguably the closest thing to a matrix, simulacrum view of reality. On top of that we rely ever increasingly on models and statistics as physical laws. Oh woe to the future, for the difference between fact or fiction is irrelevant and blurred.

Swizec 4y ago

We do all go to the same ~10 websites. There are some geographic differences, different sites dominate in different parts of the world. America has an outsized influence that may slowly be slipping. What you couldn’t predict 20 years ago is that those 10 websites are going to have ~personalized feeds for everyone. That was a little surprising … although we’ve been talking about the problem of filter bubbles since at least the mid 2000’s. I remember telling my boss in high school that I’m going to quit so I can go build a Google that doesn’t suffer from the filter bubble problem. Ah youth … Despite all this personalization, a collective conscience remains. Largely influenced by bot armies and professional memers. Look how effectively the news spreads when an american politician does anything. Especially around election season. The whole world knows and can’t get away. And we all know that GOT had a bad ending even if we stopped watching the show after 1 season, for example.

chrisabrams 4y ago

> PS In terms of mass media shared experiences, 120 MILLION people watched the series finale of the TV show MASH. Hard to imagine a similar event today. The Super Bowl numbers will blow your mind then ;)

THENATHE 4y ago
For it’s time (meaning relative to the US population at that point) MASH is larger than basically every superbowl ever, except for maybe the last couple. I’m not hip on the current viewership numbers, but literally over half of America watched the series finale of MASH
DJBunnies 4y ago
The super bowl that year had ~82 million viewers.
- anthk 4y ago
  Soccer had 5 billion viewers across the world.
  - throwaway2037 4y ago
    For a single match? This feels like comparing apple to oranges.
    - anthk 4y ago
      Yes.
lab14 4y ago
Wait until OP hears about FIFA World Cup viewership.
kuschku 4y ago
And Eurovision, with 200 million+ a year even more ;)
4y ago

neogodless 4y ago

> The telegraph effectively killed many newspapers as everyone moved to newspapers to printed national and global news Can you confirm there's a typo in here? Do you mean "moved FROM LOCAL newspapers to"?

imchillyb 4y ago
His meaning is clear with contextual clues. The telegraph killed local papers that only printed local news.

bombcar 4y ago

The "customized feed for you" is not as unique as you'd expect. It basically is the algorithm fitting you into some number of buckets and then serving you that content. And speaking of shared experiences, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqZsoesa55w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqZsoesa55w has been watched 11 billion times. However, I suspect 10 billion of those may be my kids ...

magic_hamster 4y ago
While billions might watch a video on YouTube, it's not truly a shared experience unless it happens at the same time. And at least for me, even with live chat scrolling in the speed of light to the side, it still doesn't feel the same as "Live TV" did. But as I commented elsewhere in the discussion, I still prefer the current experience.
- nullstyle 4y ago
  I assure you, I can start whistling baby shark and get more people to recognize it than I could if I started whistling the MASH theme. Baby shark is most definitely a shared experience.
  - karmakaze 4y ago
    I've never heard of Baby shark, and watching the video can't recall ever hearing the tune. You may be living in a bubble, or we all are.
    - v-erne 4y ago
      Yeah, bubble called having children. There is not a single child in my daughter class that do not know this song by heart. And I'm sure that it's not like they learned it by randomly surfing web on their own - their parents introduced it to them. It's really bad song but still its good that it provides some shared context for each and every one of them.
      - 4y ago

SkyBelow 4y ago

>Revisiting the idea recently, Pandora, YouTube, TikTok etc have all made a business out of building a customized feed for YOU. It's become the exact opposite of what the original article predicted. Is that the opposite? If the customized feeds are selected from the same group of sources, we could still see a decrease in total number of sources even though people are more customized. Here is a simplified example. Take the 50 US states. In the past, let's assume each state had 10 news sources. Generally people would only consume 10 news sources so the overlap of source consumption in each state was pretty similar. A person in a single state consumed the same 10 news sources as anyone else in that state. Total sources of news is 500. Then we enter a globalization time. Everyone gets 10 news sources, but they are custom picked for each person. But there is now 1 source per state they are picked form. This gives us (50!/(40!10!) ~ 10 billion, assuming I remember my math correctly) combinations for 10 news sources, plenty enough that each person gets a custom selection of news sources. But the total sources of news is only 50, 1/10th of the previous example. So while each selection is more unique, the total number of captured thoughts and opinions is now 1/10th of what previously existed.

cageface 4y ago

This is the argument Postman makes in "Amusing Ourselves to Death": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death Before the telegram news was predominantly local news and only major news from abroad since it took so long to travel. The telegram made all news globally, instantly available and we were suddenly inundated with information that for the most part we couldn't really act on and had a strong incentive to be as sensational and attention grabbing as possible. Newer media like the radio, television and the internet only accelerated this trend.

magic_hamster 4y ago

Having a show become a massive TV event (like MASH) is nice for solidarity but it comes at a price of having a centralized channel(s) of opinions, messages and agenda. It's a double edged sword but eventually, in my opinion, having a variety of messages available is better than traditional centralized TV. And massive TV events can still happen for something like the next moon landing or sports. The problem isn't with selecting your content, but with the reduced (to none existing) exposure to other content that might challenge your views. We owe it to ourselves to honestly test our beliefs and worldview, see if they hold up, and adjust accordingly. Today it's far too easy to avoid doing this while staying on feeds that reinforce whatever it is you believe in, never challenging you, and becoming radicalized.

mikkergp 4y ago
> but with the reduced (to none existing) exposure to other content that might challenge your views. We owe it to ourselves to honestly test our beliefs and worldview, see if they hold up, and adjust accordingly. This sounds good but I actually don’t buy it anymore. I consider myself to be a pretty empathetic person, but over time I’ve realized empathy doesn’t solve any problems unless you’re forced to put your money where your mouth is. Would I work together with a far right conservative on a project towards a shared mission. Of course! Do I understand why conservatives feel the way they do? For the most part yes. But being exposed to far right beliefs just makes me more and more crazy, even if I understand the underlying emotion. Even if I empathize with the underlying pain, sometimes empathy makes those feelings worse. We don’t just disagree on the substance of opinions( pro choice vs pro life) we disagree on the deeper ways of expression, emotion, thought processes and how we assess truth. I understand why someone is pro life but watching the thought processes behind those rants? Helps no one. Sure I love reading a good relatively moderate economist from either side arguing whatever but /r/conservative comment section and caustic twitter threads?
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  > being exposed to far right beliefs just makes me more and more crazy > watching the thought processes behind those rants I think, perhaps, the problem stems from only paying attention to people who are making emotional arguments based on ideology or repeated talking points that they don't truly understand but simply feel align with whatever group they see themselves as belonging to. This is the partisanship or tribalism that seems to be poisoning a lot of public discourse. I specifically say discourse here because I don't believe it is actually disrupting society at the interpersonal level as much as popular opinion seems to think it is. With either side, if you examine the well reasoned arguments that underly a lot of the talking points you find that they are often quite different and more nuanced than the things firebrands are turning them into. This is troubling because it means even the people who supposedly believe in these ideas actually don't understand them at all. I think this is responsible for the phenomenon of people turning out to be over all much more centrist and agreeing with each other when they make an effort to sit down and discuss these things in a rational manner. My advice is to shun reddit, YouTube and twitter and instead find some old books that discuss the topics in a rational way from a variety of perspectives, read them and then draw your own conclusions.

Silverback_VII 4y ago

Maybe it is not the "building your own reality" which is the problem but the idea of nation states in which you have to be in a particular reality without a say. It is probably better for humans to live in smaller structures over which they have more control. Concerning the division between liberals and concervatives in the States I think it is interesting to mention that Theodore Kaczynsky has written that the opposing evolution of these two systems(with the money a power they have) may lead to a larger conflict than other systems like Islam. He calls them self-propagating systems which are somewhat organisms on a higher level controlling more or less nodes, which are human brains(and machines nowadays).

agumonkey 4y ago

And it's larger than that. A lot of sentiment floating around is about how things should fit 'me' perfectly. There's an inversion of the "force" of society because we can all try to fulfill our apparent needs without anybody.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

wsinks 4y ago

I used to think that it would be hard to imagine a time where 120 million people watched the same thing at the same time. And then I realized that's an outdated thinking. Here's my example: There are certain ads that get played on campaigns. It's a longer time scale - not everyone is tuning in at the same time. But I've been able to communicated shared suffering over Forward ads to other people that I've met. If I like a similar topic to someone else and we both watch Youtube, then I guarantee they've seen (and hate) the "Toxic Poop Guy". Instantaneous watching was the past. Experiencing the campaign is the now, in my opinion. Sure, maybe not 120 Million people at the same time for a TV show. But it's definitely still out there.

lo_zamoyski 4y ago

The situation is more complex than that, I think. It's possible for some domains to diversity while others homogenize (and I think you are overestimating the diversity of views actually in play). American politics is highly polarized rather than diverse. The mass media are owned by a few large corporations while the internet offers the possibility for greater diversity of views. But possibility does not necessarily translate into actuality. Dethroning a king doesn't automatically mean more liberty. Indeed, the removal of an authority creates a vacuum in which powerful players can now even more successfully dominate than before. Information travels very quickly today, but it must happen over a medium and "signal strength" still matters. Indeed, this speed of transmission can be a force multiplier, inviting less reflection and criticism and more thoughtless reaction. We must view things systemically. The world today isn't the world of 2001 plus some new stuff, like Lego bricks tacked onto an existing edifice that otherwise remains the same. New things shape the world they enter into. Once the internet, social media, etc. entered the picture, they also affected everybody and thus the system as a whole, adapting and changing in response. It is true that the establishment can no longer exercise control over popular thought and sentiment using the exactly same traditional 20th century methods of broadcasting propaganda thought restricted channels, but new methods exist. And it's important to understand that today as well as decades ago, the less powerful often ape the more powerful. Chomsky talks about this in "Manufacturing Consent". There's your trickle down theory of propaganda. So I'm of the opinion that things are changing, the pot is being stirred and bubbling, but there's a great deal that remains the same under new guises.

pdpi 4y ago

> Revisiting the idea recently, Pandora, YouTube, TikTok etc have all made a business out of building a customized feed for YOU. It's become the exact opposite of what the original article predicted. Reality is even worse than that, what you actually get is an unholy marriage of both. A highly customised feed built out of content plucked from a small number of highly homogenised sources.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ssss11 4y ago

And in many cases YOU don’t actually choose - these ‘smart’ (read: stupid) algorithms infer what you want to see. I hate that. I think we will look back on this period in dunbfoundedness at what we allowed big tech to do.

shreyshnaccount 4y ago

media has also become asynchronous, and streaming has made a metric like live audience lose some of its meaning and should be replaced with launch week or month views?