Or, do people have agency and thus responsibility for their own choices, including their sources of information?
One needn’t disagree (I don’t) with your lament about the lack of civility, while not necessarily agreeing with the despair you show here (for perspective, late-1700s/early-1800s pamphleteers and broadsheets, where completely unregulated and far more vile than what we see today, and we won a war for independence and set up a new nation together during that time).
Further, Tony, I dunno… seems like an awful lot of ‘gee if only the government were run the way *I* think it should be, then all those rubes would fall in line with my way of thinking.’
The point about agency is of course the locus of the entire debate about whether and how information should be regulated. Perhaps influenced by the legal requirements of individual agency, I ask skeptically what we are assuming when we advocate for individual agency in this context. Competence? Good faith? Absence of fraudulent purposes or artifices? Empowerment to participate? I could make legally styled arguments casting some or perhaps all of these assumptions into doubt ... primarily because purveyors of information have determined how to exploit the way we react by default to information without us consciously recognizing they've done so. But of course I concede that while it might be "different" ... it isn't new. One of my favourite historical figures is the obscure Jean-Paul Marat, a radical malcontent whose words tapped into the primal rage that unravelled a stable society and led to mass beheadings.
I will also admit to a degree of comparative government snobbery after having lived in the UK for the past 7 years. We've struck a different bargain here. It's not permissible to take to the airwaves and spout lies, nor to publish a view without giving voice to its opposition. These basic limitations help keep things civil, which makes the fringe element a lot easier to identify. The irony is that these policies were borrowed from, you guessed it, the USA.
But hey-ho. No one will remember any of this in a hundred years, and by then I will have been dead a long time. :-)
Or, do people have agency and thus responsibility for their own choices, including their sources of information?
One needn’t disagree (I don’t) with your lament about the lack of civility, while not necessarily agreeing with the despair you show here (for perspective, late-1700s/early-1800s pamphleteers and broadsheets, where completely unregulated and far more vile than what we see today, and we won a war for independence and set up a new nation together during that time).
Further, Tony, I dunno… seems like an awful lot of ‘gee if only the government were run the way *I* think it should be, then all those rubes would fall in line with my way of thinking.’
An intelligent comment, and a fair one.
The point about agency is of course the locus of the entire debate about whether and how information should be regulated. Perhaps influenced by the legal requirements of individual agency, I ask skeptically what we are assuming when we advocate for individual agency in this context. Competence? Good faith? Absence of fraudulent purposes or artifices? Empowerment to participate? I could make legally styled arguments casting some or perhaps all of these assumptions into doubt ... primarily because purveyors of information have determined how to exploit the way we react by default to information without us consciously recognizing they've done so. But of course I concede that while it might be "different" ... it isn't new. One of my favourite historical figures is the obscure Jean-Paul Marat, a radical malcontent whose words tapped into the primal rage that unravelled a stable society and led to mass beheadings.
I will also admit to a degree of comparative government snobbery after having lived in the UK for the past 7 years. We've struck a different bargain here. It's not permissible to take to the airwaves and spout lies, nor to publish a view without giving voice to its opposition. These basic limitations help keep things civil, which makes the fringe element a lot easier to identify. The irony is that these policies were borrowed from, you guessed it, the USA.
But hey-ho. No one will remember any of this in a hundred years, and by then I will have been dead a long time. :-)