FBXL Social

I see what they're saying here, but it feels like an anachronism. When the 13 colonies were first established, they didn't have Network TV. There was a mail system, but especially in the frontiers, that was something. A lot slower and a lot more manual than what we think about today. The telegraph was eventually invented, but families weren't gathering in front of the telegraph machine to read the 6:00 wire.

A lot of people have pointed out that in the beginning, it was not the United States of america, it was these United States of america, plural. Each state was a local unified entity, and it had its own infrastructure more or less,. And the different states were United for the purpose of common defense and regulation of trade. It wasn't until the civil war that it became a much stronger federalism.

The very specific and deeply unified cultural regime of roughly in the early 1900s to roughly the end of the 20th century in some ways was an aberration. It will probably never happen again.

All that being said, I think that the people who have inherited the mass media of television and the radio and the newspapers also have largely missed the point that they basically had to work really hard to keep it a unified medium. People make fun of network censors, but one of the things that I'm realizing is a lot of people think that the platform of mass media just magically happens, when in reality those platforms have to tread very carefully to be a mass media platform. Work to polarize people, and they'll switch to another channel, even at peak media unity 50 years ago. I don't think it's an accident that many of these institutions survived the initial internet, even initial high-speed internet and initial streaming, but as the decision makers retired or died of old age younger individuals stepped in and now many of those institutions are dramatically reduced.