You know, I completely align with the analysis here, but I am sometimes convinced by people who point out that 19th Century popular media in the US both before the Civil War and during Reconstruction and then again in the early 20th C. was if anything more full of lies, propaganda, efforts to mobilize people for mass violence against lawful authority, etc.; it makes it harder to figure out how this is different, if it is, other than the technological affordances of social media (speed, cheapness of distribution, algorithmic drivers and botting, etc.) which are important in their own right. Or maybe it is right simply to say that some of our sense of norms (what they are, what they should be) was set in an aberrational era (which makes it confusing to conceptualize them as norms).
You know, I completely align with the analysis here, but I am sometimes convinced by people who point out that 19th Century popular media in the US both before the Civil War and during Reconstruction and then again in the early 20th C. was if anything more full of lies, propaganda, efforts to mobilize people for mass violence against lawful authority, etc.; it makes it harder to figure out how this is different, if it is, other than the technological affordances of social media (speed, cheapness of distribution, algorithmic drivers and botting, etc.) which are important in their own right. Or maybe it is right simply to say that some of our sense of norms (what they are, what they should be) was set in an aberrational era (which makes it confusing to conceptualize them as norms).