What was the cause in previous eras?

Newspapers and the radio

I'm thinking that mass movements existed long before either of those technologies.

The French Revolution? USA Revolutionary War?

The press played a role in the French Revolution.

That's a fair point. However I think blaming media lacks evidence. If media were a primary cause rather than simply reporting on underlying frustration then I would expect even more revolutions as media becomes more widespread. That didn't happen with radio as far as I'm aware. Maybe it happened in some very oppressed areas with social media. But I think it would be very easy to confuse causation with reverse causation.

Afaik, media before French revolution were not just reporting on existing frustrations. They were massively political, contained tons of completely made up lies for the sake of being sold or pushing agenda. There was no or not much expectation of objectivity or impartiality the way we project on media now.

I do not mean to claim they were reason for the revolution, but more that the media as we know them now are basically tame compared to a lot that was written in the past.

It takes more then just unhappiness and anger for revolution to happen anyway. The necessary condition is that the state must be weak and unable to suppress the threat to itself. You can hold people in arbitrary bad conditions for infinitely long time if you have enough power. And they won't do revolution, because you will make it impossible.

The parent claim is that polarization is so bad right now because of social media and the digital media. If the press is more tame now, wouldn't that result is in less polarization?

I don't know. First of all, social media are not the press. Press overall being tame does not mean all of it is tame. Alex Jones is not a press, but he is media and definitely drives some of the polarization.

Which leads to, polarization is not symmetrical. Some groups of society move toward extreme much faster then others.

Also, we do have less polarization then France had before French revolution.

Agreed - all good points. As far as comparing now to before the French Revolution though I hear an awful lot of folks threatening civil war these days in the US. I would never have predicted Jan 6th a decade ago.

I kind of think the warning signs are almost always only accurately seen in hindsight.

Yes, perfect examples. Those all happened after the invention of the printing press and were fueled by newspapers and/or pamphlets, etc, to allow communication to flow much more quickly and efficiently.

There was a time when the printing press was regarded as as scary a technology as radio would be later, TV would be later, and social media is today.

The claim was newspapers and radio. While the printing press may have played a role I don't think it's an accurate characterization to say the Revolutionary War was caused by newspapers fueling outrage. The causation is actually more likely reversed. The pamphlets were a result of outrage.

You're not allowed to compare current polarization with past polarization? The article talks about the driving force behind the polarization which certainly could be compared.

I think you might have mean something like “ comparison with previous eras pales by comparison “ or something like that. Calling it moot is to say it’s meaningless. If you mean that it is on a whole different level, it would definitely not be moot.

Of course. It has nothing to do with a parasitical ruling class engineering an economy to flow resources in their direction and away from the economic future of the country.

It has nothing to do with ballooning university tuitions that finance a bloated administration and fancy building while providing a much poorer education.

It's all the ability of the proles to read uncensored news

polarization always existed, social media has amplified it and not created it

You're wrong, all the digital age has done has amplify the speed.

Outrage is a common theme of previous generations, you only have to take a casual glance at any decade to find a movement fuelled by outrage.

The temperance movement that lead to prohibition. McCarthyism. Even the rise of Nazism.

> You're wrong, all the digital age has done has amplify the speed.

Of course not. Digital age has made measuring what works better to get clicks possible, and this has completely changed the incentives of the news industry.

What were the incentives in the past and what are they now?

Are you completely ignoring cable news networks and their decades-old rating mechanisms. Mass-media polarization started decades ago, what the internet made possible was to target the long tail of niches. 40 years ago, a conspiracy theory targeting Jordanian bakers[1] would have fizzled out after the first print-run of flyers in a small town, but today, it can be a self-sustaining forum with members all around the world egging each other on in their echo chamber.

1. As a random example

Even mass media wasn't the beginning of it.

There's lots of examples to look at in history of "outrage" that spread through a huge part of the world, for example inquisitions or witch trials.

Slower, but I'm sure if you thought harder or had better knowledge of history than me you could come up with examples of things that happened before even the printing press was invented.

There's probably plenty of examples in Roman history that spread out from Rome to its conquests.