I don’t think it will ever entirely be a thing of the past, because humans are inventive and humans who wish to exercise control over their fellows will continually invent new means to do so, but I think we have a lot of room for improvement in the area of making that as difficult as possible.
One example is in media segmentation. I think one of the things that made Trump able to succeed is the extent to which he and his allies controlled the media diets of his constituency. People outside their control tend to think of American Republicans as ignorant, hateful people beyond reason. That’s not untrue, but it really undersells the massive amount of control Republican leaders have over the lens their constituents have on the world. Outside the see the Fox News histrionics about cities being overrun by drugs, and gangs, and drug-gangs, and we turn to one another and laugh at the idea that anyone could believe such an obviously not true thing. For those deep inside the bubble, they believe it because they never see any contradiction to that narrative, ever. They don’t go into cities that often, and when they do they have been conditioned to be afraid of phantom criminals. They watch the news their parents watched, listen to the AM radio, and read websites they learned about in the church they grew up in, from people they have been taught to trust. They aren’t stupid, at least not all of them. It’s very weird, and very sad, to see up close how decades of uncontested conservative propaganda blasting can warp the fundamental assumptions a person has about the world.
Anyway I think the internet is a pretty handy medium for making inroads into those bubbles. It sounds pollyanna-ish, I think, given the current sickly state of the Internet, but one of the lessons I hope the world pulls from the American trainwreck is one on how to better identify and puncture media bubbles. That shit will kill us if we let it.
I don’t think it will ever entirely be a thing of the past, because humans are inventive and humans who wish to exercise control over their fellows will continually invent new means to do so, but I think we have a lot of room for improvement in the area of making that as difficult as possible.
One example is in media segmentation. I think one of the things that made Trump able to succeed is the extent to which he and his allies controlled the media diets of his constituency. People outside their control tend to think of American Republicans as ignorant, hateful people beyond reason. That’s not untrue, but it really undersells the massive amount of control Republican leaders have over the lens their constituents have on the world. Outside the see the Fox News histrionics about cities being overrun by drugs, and gangs, and drug-gangs, and we turn to one another and laugh at the idea that anyone could believe such an obviously not true thing. For those deep inside the bubble, they believe it because they never see any contradiction to that narrative, ever. They don’t go into cities that often, and when they do they have been conditioned to be afraid of phantom criminals. They watch the news their parents watched, listen to the AM radio, and read websites they learned about in the church they grew up in, from people they have been taught to trust. They aren’t stupid, at least not all of them. It’s very weird, and very sad, to see up close how decades of uncontested conservative propaganda blasting can warp the fundamental assumptions a person has about the world.
Anyway I think the internet is a pretty handy medium for making inroads into those bubbles. It sounds pollyanna-ish, I think, given the current sickly state of the Internet, but one of the lessons I hope the world pulls from the American trainwreck is one on how to better identify and puncture media bubbles. That shit will kill us if we let it.