Quote:
Originally Posted by Armistead
It's all day with propaganda memes and stupidity, people believing they're true....
|
Everything works at the speed of light now. Take the JFK assassination theories. JFK was killed in 1963 but the conspiracy theory itself didn't spin up until 1966-67 with Mark Lane. By then we'd been in Vietnam for 2 years in a big way. By 1969 the US Government had begun to lose credibility with the Baby Boomers, and at the same time the belief arose that had JFK lived we wouldn't be in Vietnam. Then you had the Church Hearings about the CIA, then Watergate, and by 1976 the JFK conspiracy was finally a cottage industry among it's devotees.
911 conspiracy theories on the other hand, were 100% internet fuel-injected from the beginning and rocketed into place in no time. The rumours begin to fly on the net he day it happened that Jews were told to avoid the building. That Arab princes had fled New York shortly before the attack. etc, etc.
The internet certainly has created massive shifts in society good and bad, shifts we're still struggling to figure out--it very well could be considered a collapse of the previous society, and the start of a new one.
There's a parallel in paleontology: mass extinctions. You can either kill most things off suddenly (mass die-offs), or you can rapidly replace the existing things with new things (mass turn-overs). Similarly, a societal collapse can be a destructive collapse, such as the fall of Easter Island, or a slow shift to a new society, such as after the fall of Rome.