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The thing about mass media is that there were gatekeepers due to constraints on the amount of content. This didn’t necessarily mean the content was good or neu

The thing about mass media is that there were gatekeepers due to constraints on the amount of content. This didn’t necessarily mean the content was good or neutral, but it generally limited how “out there” stuff could be especially since you need a fairly broad audience and everyone had to see the same things. With social media everyone can choose their own adventure, and create their own alternate realities, and that doesn’t prevent the social media companies from scaling.

lukas221 4mo ago
before mass media we had the priests and the Church which decided what is truth and what is not.
- patcon 4mo ago
  I've come to understand religion as simply a way to share a stabilized consensus reality in the high dimensional space of all possible beliefs. As in, it was easy for us to evolve to see the same physical reality (sight, sound, smell, etc) but we had to evolve spiritual predispositions in order to create arbitrary attractors in value space, which could pull us toward something shared. This, in turn, allowed civilizations to grow larger even as language complexified our imagined world into much higher dimensions (compared to more primitive animal minds) So spirituality (and it's inevitable scaled system of religions) is both an oppressor and an enabler of getting here. Like a primitive form of governance that we evolved before we were thoughtful enough to invent governance ourselves :)
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
- plastic-enjoyer 4mo ago
  Yes, but things were more locally information-wise. Every iteration of mass media did not just merely enlarge the infosphere, it did lengthen the distance between the people who shape what you believe and the people who share the consequences of you believing it. The trusted village priest had some skin-in-the-game, and was at least to some degree accountable for what he said because he shared your fate. The influencer, a product of social media, is basically the worst of both worlds.
em-bee 4mo ago
With social media everyone can choose their own adventure isn't the issue that you can't actually choose yourself, but that it is chosen for you?
- pixl97 4mo ago
  Well that and people tend to seek out information they agree with rather than information that challenges their views. Hence if you throw enough lines, you can catch almost anyone and lead them towards garbage.
  - plastic-enjoyer 4mo ago
    > Well that and people tend to seek out information they agree with rather than information that challenges their views. I don't think this is necessarily true. A while ago, I read a study which found that right-leaning people have the greatest media diversity, i.e. they also consume media from their political opponents. The problem here is less that people are being in a filter bubble or pick their information selectively, and more that people weight information differently depending whether they trust the source, or not.
    - frm88 4mo ago
      A while ago, I read a study which found that right-leaning people have the greatest media diversity, i.e. they also consume media from their political opponents. Statistics say the opposite: left leaning persons in the US have a broader spectrum of media they consume and trust. From the selection of ~30 media presented, people on the right basically chose 1: Fox News https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/06/democrats-trust-more-news-outlets-than-republicans-new-pew-tracker-shows/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/06/democrats-trust-more-news-...

lukas221 4mo ago

before mass media we had the priests and the Church which decided what is truth and what is not.

patcon 4mo ago
I've come to understand religion as simply a way to share a stabilized consensus reality in the high dimensional space of all possible beliefs. As in, it was easy for us to evolve to see the same physical reality (sight, sound, smell, etc) but we had to evolve spiritual predispositions in order to create arbitrary attractors in value space, which could pull us toward something shared. This, in turn, allowed civilizations to grow larger even as language complexified our imagined world into much higher dimensions (compared to more primitive animal minds) So spirituality (and it's inevitable scaled system of religions) is both an oppressor and an enabler of getting here. Like a primitive form of governance that we evolved before we were thoughtful enough to invent governance ourselves :)
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
plastic-enjoyer 4mo ago
Yes, but things were more locally information-wise. Every iteration of mass media did not just merely enlarge the infosphere, it did lengthen the distance between the people who shape what you believe and the people who share the consequences of you believing it. The trusted village priest had some skin-in-the-game, and was at least to some degree accountable for what he said because he shared your fate. The influencer, a product of social media, is basically the worst of both worlds.

em-bee 4mo ago

With social media everyone can choose their own adventure isn't the issue that you can't actually choose yourself, but that it is chosen for you?

pixl97 4mo ago
Well that and people tend to seek out information they agree with rather than information that challenges their views. Hence if you throw enough lines, you can catch almost anyone and lead them towards garbage.
- plastic-enjoyer 4mo ago
  > Well that and people tend to seek out information they agree with rather than information that challenges their views. I don't think this is necessarily true. A while ago, I read a study which found that right-leaning people have the greatest media diversity, i.e. they also consume media from their political opponents. The problem here is less that people are being in a filter bubble or pick their information selectively, and more that people weight information differently depending whether they trust the source, or not.
  - frm88 4mo ago
    A while ago, I read a study which found that right-leaning people have the greatest media diversity, i.e. they also consume media from their political opponents. Statistics say the opposite: left leaning persons in the US have a broader spectrum of media they consume and trust. From the selection of ~30 media presented, people on the right basically chose 1: Fox News https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/06/democrats-trust-more-news-outlets-than-republicans-new-pew-tracker-shows/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/06/democrats-trust-more-news-...