That's a popular claim - just like the claims against journalism - but also historically ignorant. Human biology hasn't changed in ~200K years, but human nature has changed dramatically. It took 190K years to discover agriculture and 195K years to discover writing, and look what happened since then! Look at our natures compared with humans 200, 500, 1K, 10K, 100K years ago: We're democratic, free, incredibly prosperous and safe and peaceful, etc. etc.
You say that agriculture, writing and democracy have changed human nature but I argue they have only changed the backdrop against which the play takes place, the players and the lines are the same as ever. People didn’t think any differently when they were hunter gatherers, illiterate and living in a family group instead of a city. The subject matter would differ but the nature of the thoughts would be the same as if you were thinking about the same things.
That I agree with to an extent. I don't have thoughts that a witch cursed me, for example, or that I can accuse people based on a revelation rather than objective evidence.
> Our wider scale dealings and political intrigues are largely the same
Unless I misunderstand your meaning, that claim is clearly untrue. There was no democracy, rule of law, freedom, etc. etc. etc. for most of human history. We handled political issues much differently; intrigues don't involve murder and civil war.
Everyone who was alive then is now dead, so of course we are having to relive that era.
In reality, there's been a long-term secular decline remarkably constant over decades dating to the 1950s and the end of WWII. That's been punctuated by a number of factors --- the advent of television and television news, mass advertising, cable TV, media consolidation, financialisation, the Internet, neoliberalism, 9/11, the US-Iraq War & War on Terrorism, the 2008-09 global financial crisis (which tanked ad spend), and the rise of the smartphone and mobile social media.
I.F. Stone interviewed on the PBS show Day at Night in 1974 spoke of what he saw as a golden age of American journalism in the 1970s, largely with the reporting on Watergate and the Vietnam War. That's the zenith to which the present situation might be compared.
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=qV3gO3zxQ1g
The topic is of course fare more complex. I've compiled a "light reading list" which I'm still working through myself, and need to add to, here:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_a...
There has certainly been a rise in the availability of low-quality crap since then - especially post-Twitter - but I have a pet theory that if people's politics hadn't shifted towards the extremes in a way that caused them to distrust the old mainstream, there would be less interest in the crap. (E.g. Fox News didn't "convert" anyone in that house, it was just a previously-unavailable sort of preaching to the choir that hit a ready audience. Funnily, after a couple decades of it, though, it lost its flavor to them.)
tldr: common view is "lower quality media" -> "partisanship and division" and I don't know how we'd be confident in that vs "partisanship and division" -> "more demand for low quality media."
Which may feed the thought that it was never that much about "quality journalism", but about "quality debate arguments". So another view on this may be rather about the decline of the quality of prefabricated debate arguments, which are arguably hard to find on social media. As it seems, the apparent answer for subscription based media was to double down on partisanship, but also to embrace the easy-to-digest quality of electronic media formats.
One basic principle is the "I cut, you choose" heuristic for fairly allocating some resource (e.g., cake). The agent who determines the portioning is not the agent determining the allocation.
This appears in the context of central bank management policies in the case of the US Federal Reserve whose dual mandate is to address concerns over inflation and unemployment. The Fed regulates these, but does not measure them --- both are instead calculated by the US Department of Labour, through the Bureau of Labour Statistics. The Fed acts, Labour judges.
In biological contexts, we can refer to external or internal selective pressures. The latter are often called "mating preferences", and are the explanation often given for (biologically) expensive, but generally non-functional adaptiations such as antlers on deer, elk, and moose, or the peacock's tail. These are generally seen as signalling mechanisms demonstrating indirectly fitness criteria.
Market-based feedback mechanisms for epistemic systems seem to me to be dangerously endogenous, in the sense that the recipient of the information is also engaged in judging that information. We have the term "shooting the messenger" as a description of this.
Robert Anton Wilson expressed what's come to be called Celine's Second Law: "Accurate communication is possible only in a non-punishing situation."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celine%27s_laws
That is a necessary but insufficient criterion. My extension would be that accurate communication is possible only when the ONLY reward criterion is accuracy of the information.
That is, popularity, entertainment, commercial viability, ideologcial conformance, convenience, conformity with tradition or institutions, are all bias-inducing reward mechanisms. Most of these can be found expressed in various informational biases or discredited bases for truth. Virtually all of them have the characteristic of being positive feedback loops, that is, information satisfying the biased reward system strengthens that reward system. Generally until it doesn't.
News that comforts or feeds narratives should be immediately suspect. Truth is generally inconvenient.
How to apply these principles to human epistemic systems remains something of a challenge. Though I'd argue strongly that the market is a distortionary mechanism.
See Umberto Eco's description of Ur-Fascism: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fasci...
Robert O. Paxton's "The Five Stages of Fascism" (https://web.archive.org/web/20170221113224/http://theleder.c...) and The Anatomy of Fascism (https://archive.org/details/anatomyoffascism00paxt_0) make a case that I interpret as much of what we view as fascist behaviour seems to be information-theoretic, and typical of any culture or community under increasing stress. (This raises several grim prospects.)
Dwight MacDonald's 1956 take on mass media describes much, "A Theory of Mass Culture": https://is.muni.cz/el/1421/jaro2008/ESB032/um/5136660/MacDon...
Edward Jay Epstien's News from Nowhere (1973) discusses the considerations in national television news production. Many of those constraints have been lifted (it's now far easier to capture, transmit, and edit content), others have been introduced (there's far more competition for audience), and some remain largely constant (there are only 60 minutes in an hour, or 30 in a half, of which a substantial portion is lost to advertising). The news business is a constant juggle between sourcing material, producing it for broadcast, audience maintenance, and working within the confines of a time-bounded medium.
https://archive.org/details/newsfromnowheret0000epst
(Several of these works are NOT on my previously-linked biography.)
A general consequence is that commercially-organised media and majority-based governance seem to have a number of factors and dynamics which drive them toward demagogic / nationalistic populism. This may be problematic.
I've somewhat tried to stick with older sources, preferably over 25--30 years old, for similar reasons to the Ask Historians subreddit: the works are time-tested, and older history is more settled and generally less liable to stir up present partisanship. The general principles seem to be surprisingly consistent over time, and it's often useful to consider modern information technologies and implementations through the lens of earlier forms and variations. Scale and speed do seem to be a significant deviation from that rule.
Where I've made exceptions for newer works, it has been those which focus more on the technology, organisations, and institutions rather than the parties involved.
That said, I'll give it a look.
Things are far from "worse than ever": https://nypost.com/2018/03/03/9-charts-that-prove-theres-nev...
Now it is consolidated under the control of very few.
That doesn't seem like a positive change to me.
Lately we seem to make a lot of proclamations about how terrible things are, and then we feel bad because we think things are "worse than ever". But usually they aren't as bad as they used to be.