As societal momentum builds against the pervasive role of social media in modern society, the major social platforms like Twitter and Facebook have increasingly become the faces of all that is wrong with society. Unexpected election outcomes, misinformation, foreign influence operations, internet addiction and more are blamed on Silicon Valley. As social companies have become our modern societal scapegoats and punching bags, its worth looking back to an era when mainstream media served that purpose and recognize that society will always blame its communicative conduits for all that is troubling it.
In our era of “fake news” and “misinformation” it seems every conversation about the spread of false information mentions either Twitter or Facebook. My inbox is deluged with almost daily pitches from yet another academic organization or company touting their surefire way to fix the scourge of misinformation that our society has, according to them, never faced before in its history.
Rewind the clock just 80 years ago.
The news media had become so distrusted that David Riesman observed “[T]he fear of propaganda [has] created a large number of citizens who don't believe what they read in the papers, and who feel surrounded by conspiracies and lies.”
The legacy of World War I’s propaganda saturation had led to widely held beliefs among the scholarly community, policymakers and the public that media was so powerful that it formed a “magic bullet” that could “fire” an idea into the public’s head to rid them of their most deeply held convictions and beliefs. Even brief exposure to Nazi propaganda could turn a die-hard patriot into a Hitler fanatic.
By 1940 leading scholars proposed that the media’s power had grown so absolute that “we live in a propaganda age... public opinion no longer is formulated by the slow process of … shared experience … in our time public opinion is primarily a response to propaganda stimuli.”
In short, the media was the bogeyman that wielded absolute power over our society.
Even misinformation was seen as being accelerated through the media’s willingness to repeat the falsehoods of government policymakers.
In our era of social media fact checking and scrutiny of how social platforms propagate “fake news,” it is worth rereading the words of the Librarian of Congress three quarters of a century ago warning that “it is the very simple technique of repeating and repeating and repeating falsehoods, with the idea that by constant repetition and reiteration, with no contradiction, the misstatements will finally come to believed.”
Sound familiar?
Similarly, a century ago the rise of the motion picture gave way to mass hysteria over the impact the images and sound could have over the country’s impressionable youth. Children were spending more and more time at the movies, causing alarmists to raise the specter of mass brainwashing, with violent movies leading to a generation of career criminals blindly acting out what they saw on the screen.
Even worse, the nascent motion picture industry was controlled by a small number of coastal figures based in California that wielded near absolute control over the ideas, narratives and beliefs we were consuming in their theaters.
Government had largely ceded control over the new medium to industry, allowing filmmakers to self-regulate and decide what constituted acceptable content.
A nation eager to bin the blame for rapidly transforming societal mores found a perfect scapegoat in Hollywood, leading to the rise of the Hays Code and greater government regulation.
A small group of elites in California building a new technological medium sweeping the nation with enormous influence and no government oversight, a societal backlash and new industry and government regulations dictating what constitutes acceptable speech.
While it describes Hollywood in the late 1920s and early 1930’s, it could just as easily describe the rise of social media today.
Putting this all together, the rise of the motion picture a century ago and the resulting societal backlash and rise of government regulation, followed by a second massive backlash against a press viewed as propagating misinformation and acting as a tool of despots and dictators to mislead the public, created what one recent author summed up as “like a real combat zone, the war of words engendered a fog, a miasma that dazed and confused the otherwise rational participants in the democratic process and drove them paranoid.”
In the end, motion pictures were the claimed root of all societal evil a century ago, before giving way to the news media as the alleged propagators of misinformation and societal strife and today it is social media that has stepped into the role of societal bogeyman.
In the case of motion pictures, government regulation arose in the form of the Hays Code. In the case of broadcast, the 1940’s witnessed a similar shift in views towards regulation like the FCC fairness doctrine.
In fact, over history, each major advance in telecommunications technology was typically met with a period of unadulterated advance, followed by a movement towards government regulation to constrain content to meet with societal norms of the day.
In the end, to understand the future of the internet we must look to the past.
