Don't think I agree. Think of it in economic terms of supply and demand. If something becomes cheaper to produce, you get more of it.
Or think of it in terms of Gresham's Law: Bad discourse drives out good.
But maybe... if the ratio stayed the same, but what got amplified/liked/upvoted got dumber, then the algorithms would guarantee that what we see got a higher ratio of junk. (But if that's true, then eventually the first two paragraphs will come into play, and the proportion will in fact change.)
Maybe it is exactly because books are so cheap nowadays that nobody aspires to own them.
Maybe it is exactly because education is free [at least in part of Europe] that people do not value it anymore [there].
On reflection: no, it's the phones, folks. On a recent train ride, a young woman sitting diagonnally in front from me
was frantically typing on her cellphone. It appeared from a distance she was cutting out some phrase, putting it into a frame and posting it to a social network. While this took just seconds, the task was itself interrupted by her checking chat messages from multiple contacts, each of which she replied in less than two seconds. This is something that I've had to watch in public spaces a lot: the compulsion to react on incomming messages - but then at the receiving end the dopamin kicks in until a reply to the response is sent and so on, ad infinitum. Timing-wise, there is little time to think deeply about what to write, the content becomes victim to short utterance ping-pong.
A few individuals lying wouldn't fly if the general public didn't buy/turn a blind eye on it.
Apart from the few who still straight believed the bullshit while every other country involved publicly called it, I think many in the US just believed it would benefit them in the long run (cheaper oil) or just didn't care that much about war (the Gulf War didn't cause that much political trauma after all)
> A few individuals lying wouldn't fly if the general public didn't buy/turn a blind eye on it.
It wasn’t a blind eye for years. The public was more trusting of institutions back then and it took a while of failed answers and excuses and then finally investigations and leaks for people to finally believe that their government lied to them.
It was a lot easier to believe that either you didn’t have all the facts or that was a mistake had been made vs believing that the institutions were actively, maliciously, telling falsehoods
And 60 years ago the US got into Vietnam on a completely fabricated incident.
People reading many books doesn't help when a few entities control all the information people get.
This is why the internet is so important and why people who want to save us from disinformation have more blood on their hands than every false news peddler outside the government.
If we want to be precise, the US got into Vietnam because the French left Vietnam (and someone made the argument that it couldn't possibly be left to the USSR and China).
I think the modern era has made throw away B.S. far more effective.
I don't think the total ratio of B.S. has actually changed all that much.