I have described this as the loss of consensus , which I define as "What everyone thinks everyone else thinks". Cronkite expressed the consensus, and not everyone actually agreed, but everyone thought that was the general opinion.
And the consensus was really ragged and mushy, not something that could be clearly stated, because everyone had somewhat different ideas about what the consensus was, and committment to the consensus belief varied widely and was unstable.
Metareality: I say mediated reality, where the important things in our life that we know directly are few and the things that we know through a hierarchy of imperfect intermediary sources (or not at all) are many. For a fictitious example, with the global economy interdependent the way it is, a big spike in the price of gallium might throw someone out of work , whilet their possibility of understanding what happened would depend on mediated sources which might not exist at all and might well be dishonest.
What we call "media" are examples these intermediary and mediated sources, but there are many others. The concreted word media with its limited meaning can confuse my argument.
I have described this as the loss of consensus , which I define as "What everyone thinks everyone else thinks". Cronkite expressed the consensus, and not everyone actually agreed, but everyone thought that was the general opinion.
And the consensus was really ragged and mushy, not something that could be clearly stated, because everyone had somewhat different ideas about what the consensus was, and committment to the consensus belief varied widely and was unstable.
Metareality: I say mediated reality, where the important things in our life that we know directly are few and the things that we know through a hierarchy of imperfect intermediary sources (or not at all) are many. For a fictitious example, with the global economy interdependent the way it is, a big spike in the price of gallium might throw someone out of work , whilet their possibility of understanding what happened would depend on mediated sources which might not exist at all and might well be dishonest.
I use "mediated"
What we call "media" are examples these intermediary and mediated sources, but there are many others. The concreted word media with its limited meaning can confuse my argument.