There's a thought experiment in Robert Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth, that if you take a person from 1900 and bring him forward to 1930, he would be stunned, but if you took someone from 1970 and brought him to the 2000s, there isn't as large a difference.
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Except that I think the internal world of the man from the 1970s would be quite different from ours.
He probably trusted the mainstream media. We do not. We know to check for fake news and to check against multiple sources.
Probably he would have a longer attention span.
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He would not be as well adapted to consuming and synthesising multiple streams of information.
I also wonder if he would have the right sensemaking apparatuses in his head ... that are adapted for our world. Or if he could create them.
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I suspect that things have changed quite a bit, if you think about the cognitive landscape from the 70s and you compared it with today.
On the face of it, not much has changed. But cognitively, I wonder if our man from the 70s would be able to keep up.
I suspect he wouldn't.
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Tentative proof: everyone from my parents's generation can't seem to handle fake news.
And try as I might, I can't teach them the smell tests required to evaluate what they receive on WhatsApp.
I do not know why this is.
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Ahh, it appears I've gotten the years wrong. It is 1870 to 1940. So an equivalent point of comparison would be 1950 to 2020.
I've been spitballing badly.
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Another way in which the man from 1950 would be different: he would not have made my mistake.
He did not have Twitter.
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On Hacker News, a perfect counter example: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=233665
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IDK about overall,
But in terms of "shared reality from media consumption", the new technologies like radio, television, internet are key factors, right?
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