Subj : Great Replacement Theory
To   : poindexter FORTRAN
From : Kaelon
Date : Thu Jun 02 2022 07:44:06

  Re: Great Replacement Theory
  By: poindexter FORTRAN to Kaelon on Wed Jun 01 2022 04:56 pm

 > Things appear worse, but we have social networks amplifying incident
 > response nowadays. Admittedly, I haven't looked at the stats to see if the
 > number of incidents is increasing or not and there's a good possibility that
 > I'm way off base.

I would agree with you.  Even before social media, cable news and the 24-hour non-stop news cycle generated, in essence, sensationalism, entertainment-as-information (or "infotainment"), and amplification of stories that were really fairly typical.  They needed to fill air time, after all.  Former NJ Senator Bill Bradley (D) wrote a great book about this in 1999, forecasting that the emergence of infotainment and the coming storm of the Internet would forever eradicate moderation, the search for truth, and lead to a much more polarized, artificially camp-driven mindset across America.

Joe Trippi, Howard Dean's Campaign Manager, also wrote in 2003 in his book, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," that the Internet had taken the average attention span of audiences from about 30 minutes closer to 2 min 30 sec.  He also concluded that the news cycle had been shortened from 72 hours (from event to completion of reporting and readiness to move on to the next stop) to about 3-6 hours, thanks in large part to blogs and websites (and later, though not in his book, Twitter would be seen as a major aggrivating and complicating factor).

Today, emphasis on news being timely ("now" or "live"), relevant (properly taxonomized and trending), and actionable (sharable, and to use Malcolm Gladwell's critique of digital democracy, "weak ties" activitism-enabled) has led to non-news being reported as newsworthy, and given birth to fake news and machines of propaganda that cannot even keep up with generating enough falsehoods to meet the reader demand.  It's a sad and troubling state of affairs for democracy.
_____
-=: Kaelon :=-

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