That is the million dollar question and the answer is a bit unclear to me. My rough thoughts are (1) technology changes how people percive reality so the technology that allowed global/instantaneous news is definitely a contributing cause to the phenomenon, but I don't know if it alone made it inevitable. (2) The versions of news stories being told have grown more radically divergent from each other as people have grown more politically and morally divided and when people see such widely divergent version of events from the media they stop believing that the institutions are engaged in the good faith discovery of truth, (3) if we don't have personal knowledge of the person telling us the news (or at least the type of reputational knowledge that would come from a small community) such that we know their character, then the only reason to trust that the institution is doing what it claims to do is if the polity has a strong set of shared social mores. This last point would seem to indicate that technology did not make it inevitable but the breakdown in a shared morality did. however, it's unclear to me how much the technology was a partial cause of the breakdown in morality.
Incredible work, Dario. I think much of the antidote to the information problem is to relearn the ways of the historical method. Those of us who majored in history were often laughed at, for what job naturally follows a degree in history? But it seems that those who have a grasp on the ways of history, who recognize that life is never as black and white as social media portrays it to be, who know how to judge good history from bad and fact from fiction, are best equipped to navigate these murky, turbulent waters.
Great piece, Dario.
Do you think this is a trend that can be reversed? Was this inevitable once technology enabled news to be both global and instantaneous?
Thanks John,
That is the million dollar question and the answer is a bit unclear to me. My rough thoughts are (1) technology changes how people percive reality so the technology that allowed global/instantaneous news is definitely a contributing cause to the phenomenon, but I don't know if it alone made it inevitable. (2) The versions of news stories being told have grown more radically divergent from each other as people have grown more politically and morally divided and when people see such widely divergent version of events from the media they stop believing that the institutions are engaged in the good faith discovery of truth, (3) if we don't have personal knowledge of the person telling us the news (or at least the type of reputational knowledge that would come from a small community) such that we know their character, then the only reason to trust that the institution is doing what it claims to do is if the polity has a strong set of shared social mores. This last point would seem to indicate that technology did not make it inevitable but the breakdown in a shared morality did. however, it's unclear to me how much the technology was a partial cause of the breakdown in morality.
Great article, Dario!
Incredible work, Dario. I think much of the antidote to the information problem is to relearn the ways of the historical method. Those of us who majored in history were often laughed at, for what job naturally follows a degree in history? But it seems that those who have a grasp on the ways of history, who recognize that life is never as black and white as social media portrays it to be, who know how to judge good history from bad and fact from fiction, are best equipped to navigate these murky, turbulent waters.