on one hand the ability to sort and choose what information we receive is going to get us all killed, on the other the alternative is you pull up one of three identical news sources and it tells you about marvel movies, a politician stole some money, features on the next phone model. a stumper really
I realize that I’m ruining the joke here, but…these things aren’t opposing forces, they’re the same force, right?
Mainstream media became complete lowest-common-denominator pablum at precisely the moment when it was subjected to the full pressures of a free information market and forced to fight for every advertising dollar it could wring out of a no-longer-captive public. If we somehow went back to a system that could actually be gatekept…well, we’d have gatekeepers. They’d select for the things they thought were valuable. And I doubt you’d like their standards any more than I would, but they’d be trying to do Good Serious Work by their own cultural lights, not pushing pablum for clicks.