It is an astute point. I agree that we have largely lost a lot of our shared reality. But as with any "beginning" of a long, diffuse process, people might quibble about the specifics.
I offer a few other moments you might gesture toward as the beginning of the end of shared reality.
First, 1987, with the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine and the subsequent boom in partisan talk radio shows.
Second, 1989, when cable TV became a mature technology reaching half of U.S. households.
And finally, maybe a lesser item, the introduction of the DVR circa 2000, when we stopped watching scheduled TV together.
I wonder if more historically informed people would find the fracturing going further back as other advancements in publishing technology allowed more people to share more views.
That was a temporary blip. Specific technologies facilitated an age of mass, top-down communications in the mid 20th century, just by virtue of how those technologies worked. It enabled a small group of people in charge of the radio/TV stations to have a monopoly on communications and media. The technology both before (printing presses with myriad newspapers) and after (the Internet) were by their nature decentralized.
Not totally convinced about the printing press example (expensive, technical). The biggest presses, with the longest reach (daily newspapers) were often owned by the richest people.
What's unique now is decentralized + extreme potential reach. Or it was. Now we have to consider bias in the algorithm that sticks stuff in front of us and is, I suspect, the modern equivalent of those daily newspaper presses.
The early pre-United States had pamphlets and newsletters. Like, a lot of them. It was a big influence on the early post office. You could get rich running a printing press but you did it by printing for the masses.
The yellow journalism era, on the other hand, was a little closer to the rich owning the press.
The penny press, and a ton of those pamphlets amount to what we now call tabloids. They were funded by advertising too, and used fear & outrage to sell copies. Led to some pretty funny conspiracies like The Moon Hoax (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moon_Hoax)
Times are not as different as we'd like to believe
But corporations were an act of Congress in 1776. Early America was decidedly anti-corporate (the Boston Tea Party was about a tax break to a corporation). Early Americans (and early thinkers who influenced Americans) were grossly distrustful of corporations and pools of money.
> The directors with of such [joint-stock] companies, however, being the managers rather of other people's money than of their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own
This discounting how many of the 100s of worker owned newspapers/magazines that were in circulation. Not everything was controlled by a select few. How did you think labor movements in America during the 1800s collectively organized across the country sharing literal war stories?
I'm not discounting it by any means. And I know about the pamphlet era that was enabled by the invention of the printing press, and the profound effect it had on Europe. But what's the typical reach of one of those worker-owned newspapers, compared to the reach of a mass circulation newspaper?
I think you missed my point: printing at scale needs a support system and a distribution system, and that requires capital. The "age of mass, top-down communications" didn't start "in the mid 20th century", and the printing press should not be used as a counterexample to support rayiner's argument. William Randolph Hearst was born in 1863.
Worker newspapers in the US had circulations as high as 10s of thousands to almost a million during the height of national strikes during the new deal (nearly several every month).
The point is you are letting a system designed by elites to uphold elites set the boundaries. There are many forms of alternative media out there, some more popular than any billionaire owned rag.
Just expand your definition and don't let others tell you what is or isn't appropriate. Especially when it comes to political thought.
I really don't know what you are saying then because US labor movements did not distribute just pamphlets, there were truly alternative media sources out there. You're forgetting that there was a real communist, socialist, and anarchist movements for almost entire lifetimes before they were all systematically destroyed after WW2 with the help of powerful organizations like the CIO.
Add in the red scare + knee capping more leftists + academics during the 60s, 70s and you have a once massively influential independent confederate type of worker lead organizations that now amount to some moderate pundit's substack where they traded advocacy for ad dollars.
But before all this there were dual power institutions and mutual aid even going as far as providing free public education to all (who do you think taught cattle ranchers how to read in the 1880s? Then look at how quickly they took up leftist literature then writing their own).
What are you truly saying here because it just sounds like you don't know the history of labor in the US, which no shit. They don't teach this stuff anywhere, you have to purposely seek it out because neoliberals consider this type of stuff heretical.
"Oh those don't count as newspapers. Newspapers are professional. Those are just zines."
It's why I hate people looking down on fanfiction, too. Aliens was Alien fanfiction. The New Testament is OT fanfiction. Hell, nolan's The Odyssey is fanfiction.
The establishment uses terms to dismiss outsider art as less-than, and this isn't much different. (They of course get to decide what the "inside" is)
It takes some technologies more time than others to succumb to the corrupting pressures of money, but they all fall eventually. We must keep outrunning it, building ever more resistant methods of communication.
I'm hopeful that the next one will last even longer since we'll have to build it explicitly for resisting corruption. Neither the printing press nor radio nor webs 1 or 2 had fighting back as part of their DNA. 3 was a bit of a flop, but there's a lot of design space still out there to explore.
The top-down centralization of mid-20th century technologies wasn't caused by "money," it was caused by their technological nature. They inherently relied on limited radio spectrum that was doled out to specific companies by the government.
By "money" I mean that you can't attract investors for a project that they cannot later "leverage". This creates a bias towards some designs and away from others.
Central points of control are also single points of failure. I think that without this bias we'd have a much more resilient infrastructure, not just in the face of corruption, but in the face of things like solar flares.
I'm saying that the bad behavior you're talking about is the status quo. If we want to overcome it, we'll have to defend against it.
Our earlier communication technologies merely had to work... at all. The next one will have to work in a world full of adversaries. The current front runners' products are those adversaries.
Sure, they have legitimate uses, but when it comes to trustworthy communication between humans, AI agents have nothing to offer except for the ability to interfere. Sure, they can also defend against that interference, but that's a bit like how gmail blocks spam while simultaneously serving ads to your inbox: they're not so much solving a problem as protecting a monopoly on their ability to cause that problem.
A fully traceable public ledger is kind of a wet dream for an intelligence agency/evil corp. Funny how much faith we put into that, and look at it now.
Agreed. There are some good options among the CRDT's which might be able to deliver on on the promises made by the pre-hype blockchain days, but they're largely unexplored.
I've thought about this more than I should but I think that the wonders of internet "channels" comes with a significant cost.
First, let me acknowledge the quasi-monopoly aspect -- it definitely constrained choice and filtered world events through the lens of their corporate overlords, the CIA dripped propaganda into discourse, etc.
But there was so much shared experience that that pretty much unified the US as a tribe. Conspiracies were passed around but were kind of like underground whispers. There was no Red vs Blue.
I'm not arguing to go back to those times, but in many ways the internet and more so, social media, is a deal with the devil.
What even is a “shared reality”? For example my mum and I could watch the exact same movie and showing at the cinema and still come away with a completely different opinion of it.
And even when TV was limited to a small few national OTA (over the air) channels, different people would tune in at different times to watch their different preference of shows. So just because content was fewer, it didn’t necessarily equate to different people consuming the same content.
The real crux of the modern problem isn’t preference drive choices. It’s independent publishers being driven out by corporate greed. Eg AI traffic making it unviable for independent blogs. But then one could argue that the current ecosystem, where the barrier for publishing being so low, is an anomaly because historically that was always prohibitively expensive. To go back to the TV example: you couldn’t commission a show without deep pockets and a lot of TV exec contacts.
I’d love our golden age of information to be persistent. But, and as yourself and others have alluded to, that’s not guaranteed unless we fight to keep it that way.
>What even is a “shared reality”? For example my mum and I could watch the exact same movie and showing at the cinema and still come away with a completely different opinion of it.
Exactly. The shared reality is the experience. You both were given the same opportunity to take in the same information. The different opinion is what comes out of the other side of the meat suit processing the experience.
Algo driven results changes the experience by changing what the user perceives. So there might never be a shared experience.
I think of it more as a basis for shared culture - I could chat about Seinfeld / Friends, and odds were high that the other person would know what I was talking about.
I imagine in prior ages this was perhaps more about folks reading a core collection of books. I expect there was less shared culture than in ^
Now it seems like we're in an era with (potentially) less of a shared cultural bases than either of those times. I've certainly met people where there's really no overlap - their core beliefs, values, etc - fundamentally different foundations. If that becomes more widespread, it's hard to know what that will do to our societies.
The thing is, people I’m friends and thus likeminded, we watch the same shows and still have those kinds of conversations. And people I wasn’t likeminded with never used to watch the same shows, even pre-streaming era, so I’d never had those conversations.
Take your examples, Friends and Frasier were aired at roughly the same time in the UK (obviously on competing stations). Most people watched Friends, but that show wasn’t really my thing. So I watched Frasier. As did my closest friends. And we’d chat about that. But I couldn’t join in with work colleagues with Friends chats.
It’s a bit like sports matches. People at work will talk about football/soccer but I’d be more interested in Snooker. So I’d chat snooker with friends and duck out of the football work chat.
Independent blogs are perfectly viable. It is basically free to publish. What's not viable and never was is to be a professional blogger. At best, some people could try to be professional shills with blogs as bait (it is good if these go away; they were noise), and an extremely tiny minority might actually make a living with people paying to support their blog directly.
I think being a professional blogger is on the rise, the driver for the viability of being a pro blogger has risen. Substack/medium etc. streamline the getting paid part. The fracturing social narrative, (rise in censorship, cancel culture, tribalism) actually drive people to pay to gain access to periodtical writing from specific people seen as authorative on one or more subjects. These subjects that mainstream media are too shy to surface, too dry to feature, or have a tendency to twist to a narrative that supports the sponsors etc.
> What even is a “shared reality”? For example my mum and I could watch the exact same movie and showing at the cinema and still come away with a completely different opinion of it.
The shared reality in that example includes only facts: OP and mum went to a movie. The movie was called X. The actors were Y and Z.
The original point of this subthread was that we can't even agree on a shared set of facts anymore! The political Right has an entirely different set of facts than the political Left, and when our reality is derived from those facts, we cannot share the same reality anymore.
Then, we're just back to OP's conundrum: "Everything is opinion." I'll say grass is green and you'll say grass is red, and there can be no fact because they differ.
Not really no. Some things can be proven while some cannot.
The colour of grass is something that’s scientifically measurable.
My point is that some broadcasters are very strict about sticking to the facts. Some will misrepresent those facts but not technically lie (eg discuss statistics that favour their partisan view but don’t share the full context behind those stats).
And then there’s broadcasters like Fox News that promote flat out lies. It’s often not even an interpretation of the truth. It’s shared as an opinion but the evidence clearly proves it’s just lies presented as facts.
And I really wish there were criminal charges for broadcasting blatant lies. Not just in America, but most of the developed world where populist-propaganda is used to brainwash gullible voters.
Broadcasters absolutely have a responsibility to ensure they communicate truthful statements in exactly the same way that any other profession has a responsibility to ensure their output is correct.
Fundamentally impossible. Communication is completely made up. It cannot be measured scientifically. Consider the statement: "Cows live on the moon". It is 100% true, although you may not see it that way if you misinterpret what is said. It's only a lie to the extent that your opinion says it is even though in actuality it is the truth.
That’s some serious mental gymnastics you’re applying there but that’s not really how society works.
We, as a society, fully understand the concept of truthful and untruthful statements. We learn it as a child and get scalded when we lie. We depend on this understanding in law, courts, contracts, and commerce. We understand it when educators teach and when requesting services of others.
If you want to claim that communication cannot be truthful nor verifiable at any level, then society would fail to function because the literal point of communication is to share an information.
Now if you wanted to make a philosophical point about proving an intent to lie, or our perceptions of reality, rather than communication as a medium, then that’s a different topic (and one I discussed elsewhere in this thread). But for your exact argument presented, we already have millennia of past precedence to prove that communication is expected to have truthful statements.
Right, society functions on opinion, but there is no scientific basis for it. Its just making shit up and running with it. You aren't charging someone for lying. Detecting the utterance of a lie is fundamentally impossible as there is no objective way to measure language. Language itself is just opinion. You'd, instead, be charging them for them for going against your opinion. No mental gymnastics needed. Its just the simple reality.
> Literally no one, aside yourself, believes that it’s impossible to communicate
I don't know, there is pretty strong evidence in this discussion that we are unable to communicate. Your apparent opinion of I am saying continues to show to be incorrect over and over — and I'm sure that goes both ways.
In fact, it seems evident that, deep down, you already realize this as you have stopped even trying to add anything of your own to the discussion, outsourcing to the words of others. Poor form to not be able to speak to something yourself, but I can appreciate that your emotions are starting to run wild on realizing that the world isn't as simple as you originally imagined.
But, as before, I likely have the wrong opinion about what you are trying to say. There is no objective way to measure language. QED.
That would depend on your opinion of what those words mean, but in my opinion neither has any applicability to our discussion. Not sure why you would want to take the discussion off topic now unless that is the only way you can find to try and sooth hot-running emotions?
Let's face it, there is no technical reason for us to disagree. The universe is what it is and that is an incontrovertible fact. We can measure the state of universe scientifically. There is fundamentally nothing we can disagree about except our opinion of the language. And, indeed, it is apparent that we are failing to discuss the state of the universe because our opinion about what the words mean is ostensibly not shared.
But, I mean, that's what we've been talking about the whole time: that there is no objective way to measure language. If you are trying to repeat what I said from the start, what value do you believe is added? Simple acknowledgement?
Not necessarily. A shared reality is one where people are discussing the same thing (within a reasonable margin) even if filtered by their individual perceptions, and drawing different conclusions.
I don't know the word for the opposite of shared reality (maybe private individualized realities), but it results in a scenario where you have nothing in common with other people other than "I saw some thing" and therefore it becomes very difficult to discuss anything with them.
I think different cultures can share the same reality, though filtered through different lenses.
If two people from different cultures watch the same movie, one finds it ok and the other offensive and disrespectful, that's a shared reality filtered through different cultural backgrounds. Even if either version of the movie is dubbed, censored, or altered in any way, there's still enough common or shared material that a discussion can be held.
If two people had completely different experiences and watched completely different, tailor-made movies, then there's very little for them to discuss or even disagree with. "I haven't watched your movie", "I haven't watched yours either", "Mine was better", "I guess... I wouldn't know, I thought mine was cool", etc. No shared reality.
My point, which admittedly my last message didn't make at all, is that "different shared realities" is not a new thing. The concept is what would have been referred to as "different cultures" throughout most of human history.
Different art, politics, passions, fears, identities, and myths is what cultural variety is about.
If you and I watch the same movies and listen to the same music and follow the same politics and share the same dreams and worries, I don't think it's reasonable to say that we are from different cultures.
What is being described as a "shared reality" in this thread feels more like globalism and less like something obviously positive or worth protecting.
I'm all for more cultural variety as an expression of individual differences.
Everything is perceived, and our perception gets filtered based on our prior experience. Just because we're not directly perceiving objective reality, that does not mean _everything_ is opinion.
JFK was shot, that's not just my opinion.
Unless you choose to believe some kind of post-modern crazyness, in which case - have at it.
You don’t actually know JFK was shot from your own personal experience. You just choose to believe what credible source claim. And even if you were there, who’s to say that your fallible memory is incorrect?
To be clear, I don’t think this line of thinking helps much. But it’s an interesting philosophical dilemma.
There is an pink elephant behind you. In practice, I believe that at least after the dust have settled, events of the type of "Count Ferdinand was shoot dead infront of 100 witnesses", like maybe 1/50 are fake? Dunno what share.
The faking part would be in who is blamed and what country to bomb etc.
"Who’s to say that your fallible memory is incorrect" - you can very easily test if someone has a bullet through their head. Well, assuming someone didn't go and steal their brain.
I'm saying that not everything is opinion, that there does exist a category called 'fact'. And you're talking about something else - a chain of trust with respect to those facts.
This is starting to go down the crazyness line I had mentioned. I get it's fun to philosophize about such things, but it's not how we live.
> you can very easily test if someone has a bullet through their head. Well, assuming someone didn't go and steal their brain.
Do you have access to their head? How do you know that someone didn’t swap that head for someone else who had been shot?
Like I said, this is purely a philosophic argument. I’m not actually trying to suggest that there isn’t such thing as “facts”.
> And you're talking about something else - a chain of trust with respect to those facts.
No, I’m making a psychological point that our perceptions are what we use to construct our reality, and that our perceptions are malleable. If they weren’t, then drugs would have no effect, psychosis wouldn’t be a thing, and people’s opinions wouldn’t differ about even the most straightforward things like god, globe vs flat earth, and so on and so forth.
> This is starting to go down the crazyness line I had mentioned. I get it's fun to philosophize about such things, but it's not how we live.
I agree. As I said in the previous comment:
“To be clear, I don’t think this line of thinking helps much. But it’s an interesting philosophical dilemma.”
Opinion and preference are the same thing. And thus personalised search results, choice of shows in the streaming era, and so on, are just a result of that personal bias.
And institutional control of information didnt really start again until the Statute of Anne struck up a deal between printers and the state giving printers copyright over written works and the state the right to cencor and ban works the disapproved of nearly 250 years latter.
Radio gave us Demagogues like Father Coughlin in the US and Hitler in Germany, and we still havent dealt with the problems radio introduced when television came along and now we have the internet with social media, podcast, and algorithmic echochambers, and algorithm induced radicalization. Radio television internet any one is just as much a shock to society as print was and we still havent figured out how to adapt yet to any fully.
> The industry boomed in the 1980s as more and more customers bought VCRs. By 1982, 10% of households in the United Kingdom owned a VCR. The figure reached 30% in 1985 and by the end of the decade well over half of British homes owned a VCR.
My impression of the VCR is not too many people managed to use it for DVR-style rescheduling live TV. Although it did have that feature. We mainly used it to watch movies that we had already been in the theater.
But, for sure, another fracturing. We weren't all talking about the nine movies in the theaters, but whatever we had rented and watched on tape instead.
My family used it to capture programming we couldn't normally be around for, especially late night BBC content on PBS. Pretty much all we used it for was DVR style recording.
My recollection was that the VCR's main selling point was the ability to record TV and play it back later, and I can say anecdotally, that that was the primary way my family used ours in the early 80s. Only later did the idea of Blockbuster and "using VHS merely as content distribution" take hold.
I never thought of the DVR as a particularly significant development. I thought of it as just a replacement for the VCR. That's what it was for me. But perhaps in some areas DVRs were used to a greater extent than VCRs had been?
When I still lived with my parents around the turn of the century, we had a Tivo DVR that talked directly with their DirecTV system's dish. The Tivo was dual-tuner and could do things like record one thing while letting a person watch a different live thing, or it could record two things if the human wasn't watching anything live.
In those pre-streaming days, it would often occupy itself by filling otherwise-empty hard drive space with stuff that people might want to watch at a time of their choosing -- based on previous and simple Thumbs Up / Thumbs Down inputs from the handheld remote. In this way, it generally had stuff recorded and available for viewing 24/7 that people in the house might actually want to watch, at just the cost of some otherwise-idle machine time and some simple user ratings to direct it.
At that time, it was a very neat DVR with very thoughtful features that were implemented in smart ways.
I wanted to watch THX-1138, which was supposed to be George Lucas's first feature-length film. It was somewhat obscure; I couldn't find it to rent locally. I couldn't find it in the published schedules for the premium channels we had, either.
I could have bought a new copy, maybe, but IIRC even that was problematic. This whole Internet thing was still mostly confined to the old-web era and inexpensively mass-produced DVDs hadn't entered the era of ubiquity.
So I told the Tivo DVR to record that film, anyway, without further instruction. Despite knowing that it was hard (mabe impossible!) to find on-air: I just gave it the name and told it to make it so.
And as unlikely as that seemed to me at that time: It did. It took months for it to find THX-1138. When it was eventually scheduled to be aired (one time, in the middle of the night): It made that recording a priority, executed that recording without flaw, and kept that recording so I could watch it later.
That was gold. VCRs never, ever did that stuff. (Most other DVRs never did, either.)
Yeah, I readily concede it's lesser. For me it was the moment that we stopped watching a particular thing and discussing it the next day. But maybe that's more personal biography than sociology.
Good point! Interested to hear about the RoW. Where are you from? Was there pre-custom search results fracturing or did you have a (relatively) uniform national media before that?
> But as with any "beginning" of a long, diffuse process, people might quibble about the specifics.
Yeah, absolutely. But for the web, at least for my daily use of it, this was the first big "shift". Learning how something was spelled by someone googling it and quoting the number of results to the others.. good times. And you can no longer find out what the page with highest page rank says about "pizza" regardless of where YOU happen to be.
Yes, there's certainly less of a monoculture now that people have greater choice in what media they consume. Personally I have trouble seeing that as a bad thing. Greater diversity of taste, culture, and opinion makes for a richer, more interesting society in my opinion. Though I recognize it does have downsides.
I wonder if there's a way to keep the positive effects of such diversity but mitigate the drawbacks. Certainly echo chambers are undesirable.
There are other people in those bubbles, it's not an isolated void. HN is one such bubble. Yes it's a smaller bubble, there's not nearly as many people here as there were watching broadcast television back in the 1980s, but it would be wrong to say there is no culture here. Same goes for the millions of other small communities out on the web and social media. But as I said, it's certainly true there are downsides associated with that diversity.
> I wonder if there's a way to keep the positive effects of such diversity but mitigate the drawbacks
The answer society mostly settled on is representative democracy.
You appoint qualified candidates via consensus, and then give them the microphone and some measure of control as long as the consensus stays strong. This is sort of what we have now with influencer culture.
The flaw has always been human nature. It turns out that half of all people are of below average intelligence and they consequently make bad decisions. Especially if the smarter half use them as pawns to assume control, which is what US politics has become.
Once the Morlocks and the Eloi have settled into their roles the entire thing falls apart and democracy dies screaming.
> It turns out that half of all people are of below average intelligence and they consequently make bad decisions.
Worse than that; it turns out that even people of above average intelligence consistently make bad decisions! AND they still attempt to control others!
I offer a few other moments you might gesture toward as the beginning of the end of shared reality.
First, 1987, with the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine and the subsequent boom in partisan talk radio shows.
Second, 1989, when cable TV became a mature technology reaching half of U.S. households.
And finally, maybe a lesser item, the introduction of the DVR circa 2000, when we stopped watching scheduled TV together.
I wonder if more historically informed people would find the fracturing going further back as other advancements in publishing technology allowed more people to share more views.