In the overwhelming sweep of the history of civilization, average people knew next to nothing beyond rumor and supposition about the regime under which they lived. The machinations of the elites in politics and industry took place in the dark. This was due to two main forces that have dominated everything until very recently: technological limitation and de facto censorship.
I often marvel as I think back to the world into which I was born. It was not long after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The now-famous Zapruder film, the one everyone uses now as the key to understanding events, came out 12 years following the murder. It had been kept under wraps all those years.
We had a small black and white TV. When my parents cobbled together enough money years later, we obtained a color set. It was so exciting that my father let us skip Sunday night worship services, just this once, to watch “The Wonderful World of Disney” so that we could observe the miracles unfolding in our time.
For most of my growing up, there were three channels. Each offered thirty minutes of news in the evening, and the time was allocated by topic: international, domestic, business, sports, local, and weather. The information shown on each channel was nearly identical. At some point, there was the option of public television but that was so dull as to defy description.
Was there a wild population scramble to know more? Not that I recall. We knew what we knew and nothing more. We could not have known what we did not know. Trust was high. The assumption was that government would not lie and neither would media because it always operated as a check on power.
I vaguely recall a huge shift with the Watergate scandal because television stations canceled normal programming to air the hearings in which Richard Nixon was flailed and flogged until he was forced to resign. In those days, people saw that as proof that the system worked, having no clue that this was really a palace coup taking place in real time.
My father was always doubtful that the unfolding of events was what they appeared to be. He would talk about it at dinner, with a bit of partisanship toward Nixon. I must have absorbed that. In school, we received a newspaper called the Weekly Reader. I had a pro-Nixon bias, which caused me to doubt the truthfulness of the thing. The teacher asked the fifth grade class who did and did not support Nixon. I was the only kid in class who stood in support.
Eventually, television expanded with more channels including those specializing in news. In 1988 as Ronald Reagan was finishing his second term and the Soviet Union was on the verge of dissolution, it was common to refer to the new times as the Age of Information. We would no longer live in darkness. We would know. The world would know. There would be no more lying, hiding, or wallowing in ignorance. The Age of Information would set the world free as the masses rose up to support the emerging global consensus for free economies and democratic systems of government. The collapse of the Berlin Wall seemed to prove the point.
It was the End of History, as the slogan went, with no more struggles and only practical work to embrace the truth that everyone knew.
I think back to the before times and remember that it had advantages. To read a periodical you had to subscribe or go to the library. To know that it existed at all required a careful examination of the “Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature,” a multi-volume set with tiny print that listed every publication with an address. To obtain copies, you need to write a check and put it in an stamped envelope with an address.
Books were physical and libraries indispensable. The best years of my life were spent camped in the stacks, every day and evening, reading until closing hours and going home with bloodshot eyes. It felt like a daily feast of history, economics, philosophy, and everything. Being there among all the books gave the sense of infinite knowledge and my own obligation to know as much as possible about everything.
The web browser was invented much later than people realize. It was 1995 and thus was born the graphical interfaces for the World Wide Web and all that came with it. It’s hard to believe that this was only 30 years ago. The explosion of information took over the world, and newly freed economies globally integrated into a new form of empire rooted in knowledge, finance, and cooperation.
There were wonderful features of the world before the Internet but getting the news of the day was not among them. Now we have the opposite problem: We are inundated relentlessly by the passing scene in politics, culture, and finance but starved for the wisdom of the past and even the skills to access it.
I’m convinced, for example, that we face a worldwide crisis in reading anything beyond short comments, emails, and captions. Large books seem out of the question. Long and systematic explanation and argument are evaporating. The smartest people I know today confess that they have lost that greater skill called patience. Our attention spans have shrunk so much, to the point of absurdity.
I’m sometimes curious how young people use their phones. I was on a transit bus the other day and looked down to see a group of mid-teens on their phones. They were scrolling up and and up forever, glancing at images and videos and moving on through a big gallery of nonsense on TikTok and Instagram. That was it. There was no comic book of my childhood and no cartoon on Saturday morning that was as thoroughly stupid as this.
And yet, for all the nonsense, we do have unprecedented access to information about real-world goings-on. The last few years have given us an indescribable flood. The last several weeks have simply blown our minds with real-time updates from all sources. The distance between the facts we are learning and the line we are getting from official sources is massive. This of course has spawned what are called “conspiracy theories” but when so many of the worst suppositions are confirmed, one eventually develops an intuition that grave skepticism about official narratives is the most reliable approach.
This information flood has of course bred mistrust but we really do have to ask the question. Is it the case that so much about the world seems to be falling apart, and so suddenly, or are we just now learning the fullness of the truth that has always existed?
For sure most people are asking this question, particularly about the attempted assassination on Trump’s life, about which there are unending questions. It reminds us of the same in 1963 except that back then, as I mentioned, it took 12 years to see alternative takes. Now we see them in 12 minutes, and tens of thousands of them. There are many more issues besides.
Will this information flood assist in holding powerful people to account? Only if we choose more freedom of information over censorship as a model. That battle is ongoing right now. Notice that President Biden chose to release his announcement that he was pulling out of the race on the platform X, the only mainstream social media outlet that is not heavily throttled and curated. He chose this platform because he knew for sure it would be distributed. Even the censors need uncensored information!
In my view, we should be grateful for the information floods and free portals of sharing. Yes, it comes with a downside. But it is generally the case that truth is better than lies. I would rather sort through the cacophony than live a static existence of preset doctrine coming from above. Freedom through bottom-up control is a better way to live. Be grateful it is our world. It has rarely been this way in history and we can expect excellent results in the long term.
