Breakdown in society


For the past couple centuries since the printing press, local and national news sources that people relied on came in the form of a newspaper that most adults read. This relatively uniform media and information gave our societies the freedom to do with the information as we wanted but still retain commonality with one another.

Increasingly over the past couple decades these informative news sources have been diminishing while news that arouses and entertains, tailored to the individual reader, has proliferated. The relied upon television news casts have fractured similarly based upon extreme views for entertainment, not reality. As a result we get presidents such as Trump and main stream news touting conspiracy theories making people believe in Qanon and dis-believing in getting life saving vaccines. Trump exponentially sped up the fall of real news by creating the meme “Fake News” and screaming that all real news is fake through his presidential bullhorn.
It’s tempting to imagine a backwards fix such as more money for NPR and NYTimes type news delivered to everyone, while simultaneously muting CNN, FOX News, and all other extreme points of view. How to shoehorn these questionable, unconstitutional fixes into the law books...is a no-go into the foreseeable future.
Why does this matter? An increasingly fractured society will eventually succumb to gridlocked government, unable to get anything done. Already we consider our neighbors idiots. When will that hatred boil over into violence? What is very under reported is how gullible the human brain is. We are all being programmed by the extremism that we fall into through television and social media. Social media that sees us as a product. People buy more when our emotions are stirred. Hence Facebook and others dividing us to pit us at each other for a profit. Can we put this evil media genie back in its bottle?

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