It is remarkable to see (in this age of the internet) the huge gap between what the media believes about the present vs. what is more likely based on the far deeper amount of information made available on the internet.
Society is made up of many parallel subcultures, and only a very small group of them keep journals, write, or otherwise record history. That group appears to be mostly disconnected from the nuts and bolts of what is actually going on technologically, politically and economically.
It has always been understood that history was unreliable, but the collapse of media credibility as we gain access to primary sources stands as a stark warning of just how little we really know about the past.
This reminds me of old shows about Big Foot, Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster, etc...
Now that many people can easily take videos/photos on there phones, it turns out there's a lot of official and police misconduct, bigotry, and people acting like dilholes in general, and not many monsters. At least not yet.
The end result of analyzing the UFO videos just ends up publicizing more and more details of military technology that should be kept secret. By that I don't mean that aliens are real, I mean the far more mundane implications of military espionage such as your enemy having extensive knowledge about your sensor capabilities because that is what most of these UFO sightings are, they are sensor artifacts.
> It has always been understood that history was unreliable, but the collapse of media credibility as we gain access to primary sources stands as a stark warning of just how little we really know about the past.
Establishing provenance and reliability post 2020 is going to be...interesting...
Specifically the combination of generative AI and the lack of current understanding of it by the history-making professions (archivists and historians). Historians and archivists rely a lot on primary sources and right now digital provenance is already a dumpster fire - I don't even want to think of what generative AI is going to do. A lot of the methods traditionally used for identifying an authentic primary source aren't going to work with generative AI.
I disagree. Historically, having a lot of subcultures wasn't a thing in any society I've heard about. Even in the west today, what people call a subculture is just people doing stuff that is conformant with the dominant culture (mostly individualism and progressivism, what indivduality or direction of progress might change and people think that's a subculture).
History looks at all available sources not just popular ones. Merely surviving up to the present age is a huge feat for any historical evidence.
I am constantly seeing disputed history when I look into historical events or figures. I only agree with your last sentence because much of history was oral and like the game of telephone it has gotten distorted or just lost.
Most records don't survive. Over any considerable timespan, the ones that do have been copied and rewritten dozens or hundreds of times (with the exception of a few archeological gems). Every generation is curating the past based on what they think is important.
Is this why "defeatist" narratives feel so much more prevalent lately? Those at the bottom are sharing their pain and suffering more widely on social media?
Not that their experiences aren't valid, but that there is an overwhelming feeling that "America sucks and is failing" when this isn't a true assessment. Not for the middle class and above, and especially not relative to the rest of the world on average.
Social media lumps all voices in together and tends to amplify strong feelings. But if you zoomed out, you'd see a very different picture of what constitutes this collective voice.
1) We benefit from social media lumping voices together because it's easier to argue against and internally reason with. They aren't individuals with individual experiences, they're the unwashed entitled masses crying on social media spreading their lies. See how easy that was? We do this a lot for everything we don't agree with.
2) Spend any time anywhere and it's easy to start seeing "narratives". Online bubbles are real: most people do not comment on any given platform. Therefore, commenters are already a bubble in themselves. So we do what humans do and start seeking patterns, and then extract these patterns into narratives. Note: this does not mean that there aren't groups of people who do share whatever "narrative" idea, but the reality is their views on it tend to be more nuanced than the narrative we've imagined in our minds. For example, 'America sucks and is failing' could be a common vague narrative people share, but you would get so many varied explanations that it stops existing as such a simple narrative until you reduce it again into a vague narrative.
3) Social media has its pros and cons, but one of its neutrals is it forces people from entirely different groups to interact with each other. This winds up becoming world shattering a lot of the times, because as humans we tend to create these internal stories that justifies our world views. We seek out things that justify these internal stories. We seek out people who reflect what we want, and this feeds into #2 and makes it harder to break out of. So, if you are optimistic you'll seek others who are also optimistic, and when social media does its recommendation/random thing, you'll encounter people who do not share this view and then it leads right back into #1 turning this into tribes. A beautiful self powering triangle if you will.
...is your solution to have those sharing their pain and suffering made to stop?
I seriously don't understand your point, nor the level of mental gymnastics it takes to see a trend of independently dissatisfied people and say - oh, my neighborhood is doing fine, you're just being defeatist.
I'd wager that if you "zoom out" what you see is a dangerously reckless societal experiment for some, and a life of modern amenities for others. Both can be true at the same time.
Good news is seldom shared or amplified. It's also seldom relevant, but I'd argue the same is true of the negativity.
Online content is overwhelmingly negative. Bad things happen, but in reality the proportionality is much smaller than you encounter online. But negativity is what gets amplified, since that drives engagement. The smallest grievances become threads that take up disproportional space in the attention feed and crowd out the rest.
I guess I'm wondering if this isn't just the algorithm, but also an amplification of certain subpopulations over others. The ones that tend to be angry.
> ...is your solution to have those sharing their pain and suffering made to stop?
I want a mute button. Or a threshold that caps it past a certain point.
Or, if this is just some people contributing to most of the problem, maybe just a way to opt out of their noisiest signals.
People can say all they want, but it doesn't mean they deserve a place in my limited attention and emotional energy feed.
Emotion is contagious.
I want my media use to drop to only the most salient bits. And I want it to be more positive.
Nobody is forcing you to use social media. If you don't want to see something you don't have to.
On the flip side you should consider that some people like the affirmation and validity they get out of hearing stories similar to their own. People have their own needs that are met by social media. If yours aren't, maybe consider that you aren't the target audience?
> Nobody is forcing you to use social media. If you don't want to see something you don't have to.
> People have their own needs that are met by social media. If yours aren't, maybe consider that you aren't the target audience?
The internet isn't for me?
That's interesting. I was here first and then the platforms came and ripped apart our old methods of high-signal communication. RSS, IRC, and forums are ghost towns or dead. Replaced with anger amplification and marketing money printers.
My response to this is that we can perhaps begin filtering out these voices and negative remarks with AI and NLP. That could make social media broadly useful again, even if the platform owners themselves would be opposed.
Enshittification is happening everywhere. I also mourn the vanishing old internet. Social media is increasingly difficult to curate, and our search engines are compromised to the point they don’t work. We are at the mercy of algorithms that are measurably driving young people insane, and you are like ‘lol at least lots of people use it, get destroyed.’
That doesn’t seem like a very thoughtful or measured response.
Confounding enshittification with people daring to express negativty in 'echelon's internet' is lacking empathy. Platform creep is a problem. People looking for validity in their emotions is not.
Anyone who says the internet, a resource used by billions of people, and prescribes changes that suit their personal preferences, is probably narcissistic too.
> It is remarkable to see (in this age of the internet) the huge gap between what the media believes about the present vs. what is more likely based on the far deeper amount of information made available on the internet.
So "the media" has no internet?
> Society is made up of many parallel subcultures, and only a very small group of them keep journals, write, or otherwise record history. That group appears to be mostly disconnected from the nuts and bolts of what is actually going on technologically, politically and economically.
Is the fact they write or record history stopping them from digging out those real deep youtube videos about the truth behind everything?
> It has always been understood that history was unreliable, but the collapse of media credibility as we gain access to primary sources stands as a stark warning of just how little we really know about the past.
Did "the media credibility" collapse in that very moment when you found out that the pentagon was behind 9/11?
> Did "the media credibility" collapse in that very moment when you found out that the pentagon was behind 9/11?
That's a funny question to ask, because a huge amount of people on the US lost confidence on the media exactly because most of them conspired to lie to the public about Iraq's WMDs shortly after 9/11.
I don't remember the embarrassment stage. I think it went from pro-war to forgetting about it. President Obama said it himself: "we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards".
If you choose to be mad at cnn/fox that is probably not irrational. Just dont go about blaming every media outlet for secretly cooperating with the goverment and question yourself first.
I was not living in the US then and i remember attending an anti irak war protest. The media info i got at the time was that the us policy was foolish and likely to destabilize the entire region. I guess the media here was right then.
I for myself thought getting rid of saddam and creating a democratic irak was desirable if not easily achievable- i was not sure what would be best to do.
I don't think they conspired to lie, they just reported the information they were getting from the government. They didn't have any way to independently verify any of it.
> So yes, of course history tends to be written by the winners. But luckily there is a dedicated band of highly trained, poorly paid and badly dressed historians out there trying to circumvent that.
Duh. But these unsung heroes don't have the means to pump out an endless amount of hollywood movies, cop dramas, and historical pieces. Even if one is educated and smart, they don't get to decide what society, at large, has accepted as truth. Even these days, I'd think propaganda is most potent once it reaches word of mouth.
I am a history enthusiast. I have a reason to believe this belief by populations in untruths is short term (I'd define it as <50 years, YMMV).
Long term chronicling goes beyond short term propoganda. Society eventually (IMO) accepts the truth. And the highly trained, poorly dressed, unsung heroes are to be credited for it. Unfortunately, society at large pays importance to the short term "stuff". Regardless, I feel these guys stand for correctness and should be recognised (preferably much before they die).
I have a feeling that most of us still believe a pretty twisted narrative where things are just black and white, which frankly, can absolutely never be the case. Humans are never completely evil or completely good, but that's the narrative I hear most of the time, not just with current events but with a lot of wars more recent than I would say 200 years... for example, today, Napoleon is not considered to have been the devil himself, though for at least 100 years after his defeat, I believe the countries he briefly overpowered thought of him as such. What do you think about that?
I got the impression that the UK WWII vets had come around on the issue already, as they faded to oblivion. "Was that other guy going to put mosques everywhere? Was he going to operate a vast white slave trade? Was he going to destroy us eternally, like this?"
We are very much past most WWII propaganda. It’s not just that words like Nip have lost their negative connotations in most peoples minds, people don’t even know what they were referring to.
Some propaganda that was around in WWII continued to be pushed, but it’s not WWII specific.
This may come as a surprise, but most professional historians don't accept the idea of there being a singular "truth" to be known. I'll link some different perspectives discussing this ([0], [1], [2]), but suffice to say that most historical work becomes dramatically less useful to society if the primary purposes of history are to satisfy our idle curiosity about the past and figure out some objective temporal ordering of events. Those fuzzy questions of narrative and "propaganda" are a huge part of why we do history, even if they cause all sorts of issues.
We still have people believing WW1 and WW2 propaganda, or have a very cliché view of the middle ages for example. With tons of fact that have been debunked over and over again being spread.
At no point in history have we been free from propaganda. I mean various rulers in ancient time claimed that their position was literally ordained by their society’s god(s). I dunno, things aren’t always great, but we muddle along and somebody usually writes down what actually happened, or at least gives the future some hints.
The reach of propaganda has increased immensely though with technology. Everyone has a little box in their pockets and many of them use it to read propaganda many times per day. Not true in Roman times!
Plus being much more educated. That might even be a bigger problem.
The idea that more educated people are easier to propagandize practically goes against our self conception and mythology but that doesn't make it less true.
I am pretty sure most people believe that their education insulates them from propaganda or lets them decipher what is true or not but that is actually part of the problem. If what they read lines up with what they want to believe, viola.
The propaganda devices in our pockets point every which way, they might have a great reach, but they don’t seem to be as good at producing a unified message as, say, a state-sponsored religion.
I trust historians even less than i trust Hollywood. Hollywood (eventually) has to make a profit, historians have no incentive except to push a narrative.
The narrative they want push is the truth. Why would they go to the trouble of inventing a falsehood about something that happened in the past? Nobody reads academic history.
Hollywood's profit motive is exactly the problem. Who wants to pay to see an uncomfortable or boring truth? Do you really look to Hollywood for accuracy?
Historians seeking truth makes sense, but this principle is corrupted when ego/credibility enter the fray. Historians are human like the rest of us and they will dig and defend their bias. Beyond that there are those who enter the profession in order to push a preconceived bias or narrative. I’m differentiating the first (unconscious bias)and the second (historical manipulation). None of this is specific to historians, historians simply aren’t exempt. Robustly principled truth seekers seem to be a small minority of the population. ~1% seems like a good approximation.
As far as the why.. every case has its own reason. But there seems to be no shortage of humans who want to convince others of how to think on a given subject.
With regards to #2, Wendell Willkie winning the republican nomination over the isolationist candidates was extremely fortuitous for FDR and Churchill. There was no real desire from the US population to get involved in another European war, but Willkie (lifelong democrat with no previous political experience) securing the republican slot (and basically guaranteeing FDR's win with no policy adjustments) made that issue a moot point since his stance on the war was similar to FDRs. Willkie eventually ended up with a position in FDR's administration.
The only truths taught in US schools are those beneficial to the empire - it's best viewed as propaganda.
When speaking about this, it is good to be clear about what kind of history is being talked about. In my opinion, the most important history is the one being taught in schools, because it is the one that everyone will relate to later on.
LMTTM is an excellent book on the subject of (poor state of) history being taught in K-12 schools in the US. I bought it for my son when he was in elementary school, and the "history" he was being taught was mostly just uncritical hero worship of famous people combined with made up bullshit to improve narrative flow.
"After surveying eighteen leading high school American history texts, he [Loewen] has concluded that not one does a decent job of making history interesting or memorable. Marred by an embarrassing combination of blind patriotism, mindless optimism, sheer misinformation, and outright lies, these books omit almost all the ambiguity, passion, conflict, and drama from our past."
"Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong" - James W. Loewen
Every country has its own schools and what gets taught there is drastically different, evolves with time.
This does indeed seem to work, to my surprise since I can't positively remember a word of what were taught at school. Went in one ear and out of another.
In general the answer seemed to be something like: yeah, mostly, but not always, and the winners don’t always have a perfectly unified voice, so this can be mitigated to a great extent by careful study. Which seems like a fine answer although not super enlightening.
The bit that stuck with me was a little aside near the beginning.
> Whether we like it or not, we view the past from a modern standpoint, privileging (consciously or otherwise) the interests and ideals of the world we know. As a result, we tend to treat developments towards modernity as natural – and disparage the apparent dead ends that stood in its path.
I think modern values are pretty good. But we sit on a branch in a big tree which history has explored stochastically. The idea that, going back, some figures could be seen as good or bad not because of the fundamentals of their deeds, or because of the propaganda (good or ill) recorded about them, but because the just mismatch with modern values is interesting…
But I dunno, I can think of any, I must just be too throughly soaked through with modern values.
It seems that it's mostly written by their sons. People who weren't there but interpret the present based on their glorious present and the average depth of historical inquiry will not be very high. It's mostly appraisal of the current status-quo.
for instance, people will talk about computing today with react/javascript/facebook/google.. maybe good old microsoft/apple. But almost nobody will go deeper and read about backus team in the first FORTRAN compiler and his later years around FP influencing the 70s/80s functional school of thought that led to rust, ES6, react and the likes.
After rewatching Fog of War the other day, it reminds me of a McNamara quote of Lemay regarding the fire bombings of Japan.
McNamara: "LeMay said, if we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he's right. He, and I'd say, we were behaving as war criminals."
Chuck Yeager to his wingman (or vice versa, can't remember) in WW2 after being given orders to strafe everything, including civilians, when coming back from escort missions - "Jesus, we had better win this!"
"Our seventy-five Mustangs were assigned an area of fifty miles by fifty miles inside Germany and ordered to strafe anything that moved. The object was to demoralize the German population...We weren't asked how we felt zapping people. It was a miserable, dirty mission, but we all took off on time and did it."
Are people still hating on GPT-4 summaries? I find them useful:
>The text notes that while powerful institutions and victorious factions may influence the preservation and interpretation of historical records, factors such as literacy also play a role. History's portrayal of England's Reformation illustrates how the 'winners' can shape historical narratives, in this case favoring Protestantism over Catholicism until recent reevaluation. The notion of 'winners' itself is questioned as too simplistic, potentially obscuring historical diversity. The text also explores the fluidity of 'winning', using the example of the Cold War's end and the subsequent scrutiny of neoliberal ideals. Lastly, the text asserts that contemporary history is largely crafted by historians, professionals dedicated to analyzing history's complexity and including the voices of marginalized groups.
I don’t know if exceptions to the rule are interesting, but the best sources for much of Macedon’s conquest of Greece come from the defeated Athenians (especially tidbits from Demosthenes who, alongside Cicero, is one of history’s more voluminous losers).
I hope historians are keep close track to the facts these days in the US. Seems the current political environment is making historian's jobs rather tough.
Never mind many colleges and schools seems to be getting rid of or pairing down non-corporate majors.
>Never mind many colleges and schools seems to be getting rid of or pairing down non-corporate majors.
That's called "the market."
Many schools are happy, within reason, to offer whatever programs students want to major in--whether they offer good post-graduation employment opportunities or not.
We should stop invoking "the market" as some sort of almighty deity who is always right. Sometimes what "the market" does is fine, sometimes it is not.
It's just shorthand for something like "what people (show they) want".
In the past, college-degree holders were scarce, so a history degree had "economic" value.
It's not that the past valued the humanities more. It's just that good jobs were a thinner slice of society and tended to be filled by the also-thin ranks of degree holders.
Of course, plenty of people who get history majors do perfectly well professionally. Many of us have mostly worked in things only tangentially related to our undergraduate major.
I'm not judging it as a good or bad result. I'm just describing a system whereby a student in the US can study pretty much anything they want that's offered by the schools that have admitted them and that they're able to pay for. Individual schools may also require, for example, taking some number of liberal arts courses even if you're in a technical major and that's part of the bargain you sign up for. But, unsurprisingly, courses are different than they were 100 years ago in general mostly because there's less demand for certain things such as fluency in Latin and ancient Greek and more for majors that companies are actively seeking. (Although there are still Classics majors.)
That’s not what poster is claiming. Poster is claiming Higher Ed provides majors that are in demand by students, be the majors useful to gain employment or not.
Students who get into low opportunity majors should be aware of the drawbacks AND adjust their expectations rather than become disillusioned and bitter.
History is written by the drives, the literate, whatever side they’re on. Those who are on the side of the victorious get exhaled in the immediate aftermath, but the writings of the defeated re-emerge in due course.
Critical race theory is only relevant to a particular time and place. The broader concept is that of hegemony in general. Do not confuse the former for the latter.
Did I miss something in the previous comment? They don't mention anything close to CRT. It sounds more like they're talking about feminist history, given the context.
Society is made up of many parallel subcultures, and only a very small group of them keep journals, write, or otherwise record history. That group appears to be mostly disconnected from the nuts and bolts of what is actually going on technologically, politically and economically.
It has always been understood that history was unreliable, but the collapse of media credibility as we gain access to primary sources stands as a stark warning of just how little we really know about the past.