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Comment by Fricken | Hacker News Reader

We had something like a consensus reality when big newspapers framed the terms of debate. Now we're retribalizing. Different groups are working not only with different beliefs, but also different sets of facts to cement their beliefs.

By the time that a society recognizes that a new medium has changed them, it's too late.

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"We had something like a consensus reality when big newspapers framed the terms of debate. Now we're retribalizing."

Looking at newspapers prior to (let's say) WWII and that statement might be worth reconsidering.

Radio was rising up at that time. It made everybody nuts. Orson Welles demoed that quite clearly 1938 with his War of the World's fake emergency broadcast depicting a Marian invasion. It helped Hitler get his message across as well.

Too late for what? To change it? The people who have a problem with this are the ones who cling to the consensus reality la-la-land. If their worldview was so fragile, then maybe they don't deserve to be the ones who dictate it for everyone else.

Functional societies are founded on trust, shared beliefs, and shared goals. You can reject the consensus reality la-la land, as a great number of people have in the last decade, but you're just trading in for a non-consensus reality la-la land.

We don't really do objective reality well beyond the scope of our own immediate shit. We're like the six blind men and the elephant. We each have our own little fact about the elephant, but no one is able to see the elephant as a whole, and trying to paint a complete picture out of the disparate bits of information can yield outcomes very different from objective reality.

The post war consensus seems to have been a very complex thing. Part if it came from the New Deal, part of it was a shared goal to win the cold war. Goals change, i dont know if values also change.

Interesting thought, but then everything else is much more fragmented: entertainment is more fragmented, consumer products more varied and cars with lots of customizations. Now politics are alsomore fragmented. I really hope we find a way to adjust democracy to these realities.

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