"Hey you fuckin hear what happened to Jim down the road?"
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2026
28 points (91.2% liked)
Asklemmy
55312 readers
529 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 7 years ago
MODERATORS
OK, get this: the media used to do its job. Before Murdoch and then other billionaire assholes bought everything up, the media used to let people know, without too much bias and editorialising (of course there was some, but not completely wide-spread in the same direction), what was going on in the world.
Now almost all media is complicit in cover-ups and downright lies. The media doesn't push back, doesn't investigate, doesn't make politicians shit scared like they used to. You have to go back to the mid or early 80s and before to see what media was actually capable of. Watergate toppled a president, but these days a similar scandal would just be a Wednesday.
Of course all this is by design. An ignorant public make for ignorant voters, which in turn makes campaigns a lie-filled popularity contest instead of something they ought to be: a discussion of ideals and policy. Each electorate is effectively a tribe voting on who is going to represent them in congress with the rest of the country. But do your elected representatives actually represent you now? Not generally, mainly because most voters don't know what they're voting for and that's because the media, which ought to be reporting on what's going on so the public are informed, has failed.
Sorry I seem to have gone on a bit of a rant, but this is something the REALLY pisses me off.
Believe it or not, people talk to one another in their communities.
This. Word-of-mouth travels fast, especially in tight communities.
There used to be this thing called
Having a fucking conversation
Apparently people just don't do that anymore from how you're describing the world
Usually somebody would come busting through the front gate yelling "THE POLICE ARE HERE! DA GONNA BEAT YO ASS!!!" and everybody would take off running.
We used to have a thing called journalism. While far from perfect it was a lot better than the sad caricature we have today.
With police brutality specifically, a highly professional, highly centralised, very white and very pro-authority press might not have covered it better.
Often, it just wasn't well publicised, which is why police - and people friendly with the police - got away with so much more shit than they could now. If there weren't a ton of unfriendly witnesses, with no video they could just lie. If there was, the papers had the option of covering it, but the average journalist was friendly with the police. They might just make a gentleman's agreement that whatever incident was either a regrettable mistake, not worth upsetting the public about, or even that it was illegal but good. Things had to get pretty crazy bad before it got reported.
If you were a black person, you and people you know just very directly felt it. The police could harass or beat you whenever they wanted, which was often enough. And that was on top of the more open racist policies that existed.
Do consider, as well, that informal violence was more normised. Now, if you punch somebody you probably get charged with assault. Then, brawls happened fairly often, and as long as it stayed fisticuffs, it tended to be considered a personal matter. Which meant getting roughed up by the police probably wouldn't be considered brutality at all until deadly weapons come out, or it's an extended beating while you're restrained.
Are people starting to forget how society worked before social media?
People would congregate and talk. They would go to church or participate in various clubs and social events where they would meet their peers and talk about happenings in their communities. Besides that there were a variety of publications where news would be posted in and spread such as local newspapers, magazines and periodicals.
You have to remember a lot of kids (I say kids and I am only 27) younger than 30 donβt remember a world before social media or we got exposed majorly at like age 10-12 because our parents didnβt give a shit and also had zero computer literacy and therefore didnβt understand the legit consequences of letting kids online all the time. Like yeah your Gen X parents know how to post their backyard ring camera footage and baby monitor recordings on FB and instagram now? My boomer parents barley know how to work a TV remote and theyβre pirating all their movies/tv now. Also still paying for cable? I digressβ¦
I had a smartphone when I was like 14, now kids are trained on smartphones and tablets before they can even walk. Iβm serious itβs 1000x harder for them to ask for something in real words than send an instant message.
Talk to people, like in person?
Almost like chatting. With text to speech, except without typing anything out. And no keyboards, and no screens, and no computers. And being in the same room, like IRL.
What's transcribing the speech to text?
The feds
You had to do that yourself. In your head.
With automatic, on device, realtime translation, if talking to a foreigner and knowing their language.
Just make a black friend and I'm sure they'd tell you all about it.
Actually, this amazing trick still works to this day!
Why do you keep making new accounts to ask the same questions over and over bro?
Bot training? Ask the same stupid question and feed the different answers into the lie machine.
I dunno. I just assume anything stupid is nefarious now :/
The internet didnβt invent human communication lmao.
I don't know about the 50's, but my father and his crew of ex-military hippy activists in the 60's, used to take pictures of the FBI who were trying to infilitrate the groups as agent provocateurs and/or were photographing the protestors to create dossiers. They then posted those pictures, along with the name of the hotel they were staying at on every lamppost in the downtown area. The FBI tucked tail and left after that. This happened during the Vietnam protests in Missoula, Montana.
For a big part, they didn't. Of course in smaller circles people knew exactly what happened, but nationally it was denied or downplayed and covered up by the South. Until sometimes they couldn't. Like in the Emmett Till case, who was on a family visit from Chicago and was lynched in Alabama. This got a lot of media coverage nation wide for a change.
thank you for commenting without being a complete asshole for no reason
People make fun of trots and their newspapers, but that was one way.
News travelled at lightning speed through the telegraphic poles, see! A modern miracle, see! Faster than a printing press drawn by a score of horses. You won't believe it until you see it. Bet your bottom dollar!
White people mostly didn't. Black people talked to each other.
the same way it'll be allowed to happen once we finish self imposing the AI based panopticon around ourselves -- word of mouth.
the news? i guess, back then it wasnt a corporate infested giaht ad campaign disguised as the news cycle. But that died together with most of journalistic integrity
Emmit Till's coffin. No, but it was a lot worse back then. People were more violent in general. It was common for fights to break out. Gentility has always been reserved for the upper class. It was expected and the point that the lower classes got roughed up.
Radio.