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.
Conversation
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.
1
1
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.
1
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.
2
Replying to
Fake news is not a recent phenomenon:
cits.ucsb.edu/fake-news/brie
I’m skeptical of reports claiming reduced attention spans - I removed reading a study which measured this and it was more or less the same from prior decades but the tech-enabled ‘interest span’ has changed.
2
1
Replying to
As a counterpoint on the fake news thing: npr.org/sections/money
The playbook is more sophisticated in Russia, perhaps, but China has picked up on it where I live. The amount of Chinese propaganda my dad shares is insane.
Replying to
Oh yeah, it’s definitely a massive deal when it’s government propaganda by authoritarian regimes (1);
I had Western social media in mind when talking about fake news (2)
(1) politico.com/news/magazine/
(2) cbc.ca/radio/thesunda
1