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Originally Posted by spirit4711  Well there was no internet but there were many possibilities to find out anyway. One had to follow the news, research publications from scientists, documentaries, read books, journals such as Scientific American etc. So it's not that illogical I think. |
how do you know most of the forms of media you listed were committed to sharing truth even if it went against established perspectives? my favorite pleasure reading is SciAm Mind, and they don't really tread very far past the boundary between established, almost dogmatic approaches to science, and the things that might be more on the fringe but are still worthy of dissemination. my sense is that in that time period, unless you really dug through a lot of material in a college library, your options basically consisted of materials that reinforced a primarily mainstream view.
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Originally Posted by spirit4711 I grew up before the internet was widespread (I find it hard to believe now  ) and there were loads of publicly available information. It took much more time to collect it yes, but it was there. |
more time to collect it means increased chance someone will decide it's not worth the trouble. so yes, it was there, but i think we need to consider realistically how much the average person is willing to work at getting to the truth. frankly, finding truth that feels right to you takes a lot of work. and i'm not sure most americans, non-counter-culture americans, from that time would be interested in doing that. wouldn't they be more likely to assume the talking tv heads were telling them what they needed to know? that's what i meant in the earlier post when i said americans seemed less suspicious of organized entities (gov't., media) then.