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Comment by losteverything | Hacker News Reader

It says radio tv and papers were it, then.

Having lived pre internet news days i am a minority that can truly describe how it was a different world back then. Our world is so much better because tv radio and newspapers matter so much less. We have to think for ourselves and decide which topics are newsworthy:not have others coax and decide what is important.

Long live the internet

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I graduated from high school in 1968 and I find that media and its contents including the internet are more centralized and homogeneous now than they were then. The internet did not not just add to the mainstream media, it replaced some of its most interesting parts and replaced much the underground media that existed alongside it. In those days it was not just Time/Life/Newsweek/ABC/NBC/CBS, you could also find on the newstand left- and dissident journals like Ramparts and Evergreen Review, and their right wing counterparts. And, some of the contents of the mainstream media itself were higher quality and more varied. Compare a current issue of Esquire or Rolling Stone - now mostly entertainment industry promotion and fluff - with a 1968 issue, where they had very long articles by authors like Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Oriana Fallaci, and many more. Beyond that there was a thriving world of underground papers and newsletters with contents ranging from sharp and pertinent to crackpot, with odd and sometimes wonderful DIY production and design. Not just print media - the FM radio station I listened to was literaly underground, their studio was in a church basement. People organized huge demostrations using these DIY media. Yes, it is probably easier now for a random person to get their opinions in front of a lot of eyes, but most of these carry little information, they mostly just repeat what the writer has seen/read elsewhere - and it appears on the same homogeneous platform with everything else. It takes a bit more energy and ingenuity to express your opinions or self-expression in a self-published mimeographed or xeroxed newsletter, but it contributes more variety and might even make a bigger impression.

Agreed, "real" alternative voices were more noticeable back then. On the newsstand, in the library, in a magazine everyone read, at a campus talk or on TV. Noam Chomsky used to appear on PBS when was young - now you have to go to RT (literally!) or other foreign media like AJ/BBC/DW to see anyone outside the dualistic status-quo.

  We have to think for ourselves and decide which topics are newsworthy:not have others coax and decide what is important.

Well, most of the time people choose the convenient route of confirmation bias. The internet is certainly not providing any solutions to that problem currently..

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