Imagining the Proto-Blogosphere, by Bryan Caplan

How is blogging different from traditional media?  My knee-jerk answer is, "It caters to a higher-IQ audience," but that's not really true.  The real story is that blogging lets a million voices bloom - including but hardly limited to voices aimed at high-IQ audiences.  The good news is that if you're so inclined, you can now find intelligent, candid defenses of almost any idea.

Now consider the following counterfactual.  Something like blogging (but no full-blown internet) came along decades or centuries earlier.  How would the cream of the proto-blogosphere have reacted to...

1. Apartheid in the 1980s

2. The civil rights movement in the 1960s

3. The Great Depression

4. World War I

5. The anti-slavery movement in the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s

Please be civil and show your work.  I'll repost the best answers in a followup piece.

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