Internet vs. Information
In the grand scheme of things, there was a time not long ago when you would get your news from the paper. You would subscribe to your local media outlet for a small fee, and the newspaper would be delivered to your door. You could rest assured that the articles you read were of the highest possible journalistic standards - they were in the New York Times, after all!
Nowadays, it’s a little different. The Internet, particularly social media, has fundamentally altered the way we consume our information. For instance, the barrier to posting something that could be considered “news” is far lower than it used to be. Instead of going to journalism school and earning your place on an editorial board, all you have to do is make an account on whatever social media site you desire and repost an article to your followers.
A screenshot from a presentation I gave in October 2024 about the impact of the Internet on news.
The Internet has jeopardized the ability of newspapers to remain competitive. After all, you have the latest news at your fingertips that costs you nothing financially (though it may cost you your mental health). In fact, more than a quarter of U.S. news outlets that existed in 2005 had shut down by 2022. This has been linked to an increase in political polarization, because it focuses most coverage on national news.
Anecdotally, while I like to think I pay a lot of attention to news in the United States (because I’m terminally online), I barely know what’s going on in my own city. That’s a pretty damning indictment of the mainstream media, isn’t it?
Let me expand on the topic of polarization with an example. Let’s take Jon Tester, who, as of the day I’m posting this, is no longer a United States Senator from Montana. Tester, a Democrat who served three terms in the upper chamber, was first elected against a scandal-plagued incumbent in 2006, back when scandals still mattered electorally for Republican candidates. Nowadays, we’re all numb to this shit.
In 2012, even when Mitt Romney carried Montana by more than 13 percentage points, Tester was able to win reelection by focusing on his own accomplishments. Because local media in Montana was far more robust than it is now, people who voted Republican for President that year were more aware of a reason why they might vote for Tester on the same ticket. He presented himself as a hard-working dirt farmer who could resonate with his state’s voters.
Former U.S. Senator Jon Tester (D-MT) working on his farm. Image taken from Tester’s Wikipedia article.
Tester sought a fourth term in 2024. By that time, as this July 2024 article from The Nation points out, local media in Montana had significantly withered away. These small outlets, which would previously devote considerable time to discussing Tester’s accomplishments on veterans’ affairs or public land conservation, in many cases no longer exist. They’ve been replaced by talk radio or Fox News, which were all too eager to remind voters that Tester was a Democrat, and that anyone who votes for Trump should also vote against Tester.
It didn’t matter that his opponent, Tim Sheehy, lied about shooting himself in a national park. It didn’t matter that Sheehy made highly offensive remarks about Native Americans. Many Trump voters in Montana didn’t know Sheehy had done those things, or else they didn’t care. And Tester lost by just over 7 percentage points.
Of course, the Montana Senate race was not the only election impacted by the decline in local media. All over the country, millions of voters had no idea what the hell was going on. To provide a particularly egregious example, searches for “did Joe Biden drop out” skyrocketed in swing states on November 5.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I remember watching the June 27 presidential debate with my mother and my terminally ill Bouvier des Flanders. I remember watching Biden struggle over his words, and I remember the existential dread I felt as I saw Trump tell horrendous lie after horrendous lie, and Biden let him get away with it.
When July 21 came around, I was on my couch on the front porch, isolating myself from the rest of my family because I’d tested positive for COVID. I was talking on a Discord server when I got a ping from a mod, stating that Biden had indeed dropped out. Sure enough, the 46th President had released a statement and all that.
Joe Biden’s letter announcing his withdrawal from the 2024 presidential election. Image taken from the New York Times.
After Trump won the November 5 general election, I was not only shocked and disgusted, but I was also baffled. How could so many people not know that Biden had withdrawn from the race? It was one of the biggest news stories of the year, capping off a chaotic 24 days in American politics! And yet, so many people didn’t know it had happened.
It gets worse than that. Inflation is commonly cited as a reason why Biden was so unpopular - people were willing to vote for fascism just because eggs were a couple cents more expensive. But inflation was far worse in Europe, in large part because that continent has suffered more economic impacts from the war in Ukraine. And yet in most European countries, Trump would be lucky to get 10% of the vote, if he were allowed to run at all!
I could go on and on about how uninformed so many people in this country are. In fact, the Google search trends in the days following the election speak for themselves. And of course, Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter (which I now call Xitter, pronounced “shitter”) hasn’t exactly helped matters. He’s altered the algorithm to promote right-wing, hateful content above all else, and I recommend anyone who values humanity to jump ship to BlueSky.
However, I hope I’ve demonstrated that the Internet is part of the problem. It’s somewhat ironic, too. Twenty or so years ago, the general consensus even among academia was that the Internet, this superhighway of information that could document the sum total of all human knowledge, would all but negate the propagation of conspiracy theories and falsehoods. Surely nobody could go on believing that the Earth was flat, or that climate change was a hoax, or that nobody died at Sandy Hook, when there was so much publicly available evidence to the contrary.
It feels as though we’ve opened Pandora’s Box, but all hope is not yet lost. We have to accept, however, that the mainstream media (not to mention social media) isn’t going to save us. Given that much of the mainstream media is already bowing down to Trump in advance, we have to do it ourselves.
That’s where I come in. The main reason I continue to maintain this blog is because journalism is an essential resource even now. We can still use digital technologies for good, but we need to understand that the Internet has been part of the problem just as much as it’s been part of the solution.
That’s why I urge you all to subscribe to my newsletter and spread the word. Thank you.
