Unfortunately, I think it's hard to imagine the monsters going back inside the box. At the risk of sounding like a nostalgic old person, the prevalence of social media (and the erosion of the mass media's sense of responsibility) amplified fringe views, and radicalized big swaths of the population, where the old line legacy media tended to herd.
In the 1960s and 1970s, regardless of your ideological persuasion, you probably knew and trusted Walter Cronkite. And while the reporting of your Cronkites sometimes missed, and missed in big ways (Vietnam, for instance), the orientation of the media was toward factual, sober analysis.
With first Fox and then a varied fringe media diet, it's much easier to find and consume conspiracy theories, click bait, and other forms of nonsense. Those things existed in the past, but being a card carrying member of the John Birch Society or the Communist Party of the USA or whatever took a lot more effort than turning your TV to CBS at dinner time or picking the New York Times off your doorstep. Instead of the media diet bringing people who might be susceptible to fringes into the mainstream, the internet pushes out and connects them. A lot more people these days "do their own research," and conclude that vaccines cause autism, and the Federal Reserve is run by a colluding cabal of greedy Jews, and even that elementary schoolers slaughtered in Sandy Hook were crisis actors.
And instead of the bullhorn of the New York Times and CNN and such drowning out and marginalizing those voices, they feel like they have to compete with them, and to avoid alienating their audience. So instead of the pervasiveness of mass media sorting truth from nonsense, it amplifies sensationalism.
If there's any canonical idea that I think the last decade or two have thoroughly discredited, it's the idea that the marketplace of ideas leads to a better informed populace. At this point, I think it's clear the opposite.
Unfortunately, I think it's hard to imagine the monsters going back inside the box. At the risk of sounding like a nostalgic old person, the prevalence of social media (and the erosion of the mass media's sense of responsibility) amplified fringe views, and radicalized big swaths of the population, where the old line legacy media tended to herd.
In the 1960s and 1970s, regardless of your ideological persuasion, you probably knew and trusted Walter Cronkite. And while the reporting of your Cronkites sometimes missed, and missed in big ways (Vietnam, for instance), the orientation of the media was toward factual, sober analysis.
With first Fox and then a varied fringe media diet, it's much easier to find and consume conspiracy theories, click bait, and other forms of nonsense. Those things existed in the past, but being a card carrying member of the John Birch Society or the Communist Party of the USA or whatever took a lot more effort than turning your TV to CBS at dinner time or picking the New York Times off your doorstep. Instead of the media diet bringing people who might be susceptible to fringes into the mainstream, the internet pushes out and connects them. A lot more people these days "do their own research," and conclude that vaccines cause autism, and the Federal Reserve is run by a colluding cabal of greedy Jews, and even that elementary schoolers slaughtered in Sandy Hook were crisis actors.
And instead of the bullhorn of the New York Times and CNN and such drowning out and marginalizing those voices, they feel like they have to compete with them, and to avoid alienating their audience. So instead of the pervasiveness of mass media sorting truth from nonsense, it amplifies sensationalism.
If there's any canonical idea that I think the last decade or two have thoroughly discredited, it's the idea that the marketplace of ideas leads to a better informed populace. At this point, I think it's clear the opposite.