I would also encourage reading about the press before the 20th century. Every random pamphleteer or newspaper churned up all kinds of despicable rumors or partisan rhetoric as bad or worse than Twitter. The idea of “objective press”
is pretty new...
The difference many less people had those newspapers or pamphleteers in their face all day long. The odds of people running into those stories in their personal lives were pretty small.
The analogy is like people complaining about A-Bombs and someone replying "300yrs ago people killed each other with swords. The world hasn't changed. People always killed other people".
In both cases the scale has changed by many orders of magnitude
Another multiplier is that Facebook and others have data scientists and psychology PHDs that are working to maximize the addictiveness of these apps to suck more of our eyeballs attention
I wonder how the perception of who the writer is influences the people who read the 'message'.
When "the press" publishes something, you know it's "the media", since you're reading it in the paper.
On Twitter, the message presents itself as coming from "regular people, like you and me".
What I mean is that maybe people may have some kind of skepticism when reading a paper, such as I they know that this paper has rather this kind of views whereas that other paper will have that other kind. And also, this was written by some journalist and approved by the paper's editor, so it could very well be a fringe opinion since only few people were implicated. We don't know that this opinion is shared by many people. Contrast this with Twitter, where it appears that "a lot of different people" seem to be holding this or that opinion. People who aren't overtly belonging to the same group or organization. Which means the opinion isn't just some random group making things up, there must actually be something to it.
I'm not saying this works every time and "despicable rumors or partisan rhetoric" in the press never worked. I'm sure they did. But I think it worked on fewer people, and in order for those rumors to take hold in society they would have to spread through the people, not through newspapers, which must have been slower at the time.
Or the newspapers would have to be very convincing in order to influence many people directly, just writing a 140 character blurb wouldn't have done it.
> I wonder how the perception of who the writer is influences the people who read the 'message'.
Given e.g. the propensity for politicians to emphasise their "salt of the land, common folk" attributes whilst hiding their gold-plated toilets, etc., I suspect it's not inconsequential.
If you want a real open society, you need to address as many people as possible and the best way to do that is by including the most perspectives as possible. Journalism evolved here until financial incentives drove us back to strong opinions.
Propaganda undermines trust and it is actually far easier now to identify untruthful and biased news compared to the past. So a regression would be costly.
