Bad Thinkers: On Accelerationism, Conspiracy Theory, and Intellectual Vices

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Bad Thinkers: On Accelerationism, Conspiracy Theory, and Intellectual Vices

Nintendo Kid: Aug 4, 2011; by Smythe

Quidam Viator posted:

I'm thinking Walter Cronkite times. You had a three-channel media, and people still read the same newspapers. Vetted, legitimate information was stored in libraries. Access to non-mainstream ideas took real work, and people with weird, out-there ideas were isolated, rather than connected by the internet.

The media consolidation created more unified opinions and for better or for worse, tended to limit the diversity of opinions on world events. The fracturing caused by the explosion of options near the end of Vietnam, Nixon and Watergate, and finally, 24 hour news and the advent of the internet have massively democratized the information ecosystem.

I think it took away a comforting (if possibly misguided) sense that Americans had that old Walter Cronkite was delivering them news they could trust, and not feel fooled or lied to.

I could be wrong, but that's the impression I have gotted of the period.

Lol no people did not read "the same newspapers". Most cities if not most metro areas had several different competing papers, each often having a particular partisan bent to them. Your high-flyin' business man or guy with pretensions to being such might pay the substantial expense to have a national paper of record like the WSJ, Philadelphia Inquirer, New York Times, Washington Post or Los Angeles Times, or that one Chicago newspaper delivered out to his area daily, sure. But the average Joe? He'd pick from a good 4 or 5 papers in major metros or from 2 or 3, usually even more partisan, papers in smaller areas.

Also "vetted, legit info in libraries"? No not really. Then as now plenty of libraries happily stocked books that were barely research, and particularly in history and economics often flat out wrong, though those facts often weren't widely known until modern times, when more critical methods were used. And if you were in religious areas, you could easily expect to have nothing on things like evolution, or even on other religions.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2015 22:05

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Nintendo Kid: Aug 4, 2011; by Smythe

Quidam Viator posted:

I guess I'm a loving relic from the old days when people would post whole articles in DnD, along with commentary, and debate and discussion would ensue. The snarky responses I'm getting seem to indicate that not only is the article that I found interesting poo poo, but my writing is poo poo too. I mean, out of the responses, how many are one-liners?

If you read the whole thing, and feel no impulse to reflect on your own positions, the evidence you believe in, and your own intellectual habits, then I guess I underestimated the seriousness of this forum anymore. I found, in reading it, that I have been making some pretty serious intellectual errors, which were in that "wall of text", submitted in earnest to a forum I'd like to still respect.

You're not a relic, you're a shoddy faked antique, trying to be sold to a museum as the real deal.

Yes 14 years ago this forum would have "seriously debated" this stuff but that's because most of us posting back then were college undergrads, teens, or even younger and the ideas were fresh then. I was like 11 then posting in Current Events and hell I'd probably think that article was mindblowing because I was a literal child.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2015 22:12

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Bad Thinkers: On Accelerationism, Conspiracy Theory, and Intellectual Vices