> That's where the notion of a shared reality comes from.
Sure, but that reality was a top-down creation. How much airtime did dissidents get? Socialists? Women? Marginalised people? And I don't mean reporting on them, but stories by them.
Sure, but that reality was a top-down creation. How much airtime did dissidents get? Socialists? Women? Marginalised people? And I don't mean reporting on them, but stories by them.
But I'd like to highlight other forces. One was technological, 3 TV channels or whatever was all they could do, and this implied that there was going to be a pretty high degree of conformity. You couldn't broadcast weird Italian movies because only a few percent were interested. The 4 big car companies who bought the ads which paid the bills really didn't want to be associated with anything partisan, they all needed to sell to everyone.
Another was historical / emotional. The nation had just emerged from this gigantic world war, and it was a spectacular victory, which gave enormous prestige to the huge centralized machines built to fight it. They built a lot of similar machines back home, big corporations with a commander-in-chief who wasn't a self-made robber barron, he was promoted up the ranks. Big unions, and big regulation.
This experience also squashed a lot of earlier differences. You say "Women? Marginalised people?" but this seems like a modern take, I think they would have said "Irish? Polish? Jewish?". These earlier identities and divisions were eroding in favor of this shared one, I mean, a Catholic could be elected president, that was a big deal.
But all of these are gone now. So perhaps 100 years ago is a better guide than 50 years ago.
> These earlier identities and divisions were eroding in favor of this shared one
Shared by white people, for the most part.
I'm not sure what you mean in your penultimate paragraph. "identities and divisions eroding" is only partly true, surely. You could certainly argue the opposite is true - see the women's lib and civil rights movements for examples of people fighting back against conformity.
Right, the experience of black people was pretty distinct, 20s-60s-now, and those are really interesting stories. And there's a fractal of smaller group stories, too. But I think the story arc from hyper-partisan 19th C news-politics to Walter Cronkite to Twitter can be understood (to a large degree) before zooming in that far. Although once you do, then indeed, the present tendency to focus on smaller groups' stories does look like part of the same Cronkite -> Twitter arc.
I wish more people thought this way. We think we're so smart!
In off to bed, but thank you for the reply, I understand more what you meant now.