I don't know how old your mom is, but my pet theory of authority is that people older than about 40 accept printed text as authoritative. As in, non-handwritten letters that look regular.

When we were kids, you had either direct speech, hand-written words, or printed words.

The first two could be done by anybody. Anything informal like your local message board would be handwritten, sometimes with crappy printing from a home printer. It used to cost a bit to print text that looked nice, and that text used to be associated with a book or newspaper, which were authoritative.

Now suddenly everything you read is shaped like a newspaper. There's even crappy news websites that have the physical appearance of a proper newspaper website, with misinformation on them.

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bee_rider 21 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Could be regional or something, but 40 puts the person in the older Millenial range… people who grew up on the internet, not newspapers.

I think you may be right if you adjust the age up by ~20 years though.

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lordnacho 13 hours ago | parent [-]

No, people who are older than 40 still grew up in newspaper world. Yes, the internet existed, but it didn't have the deluge of terrible content until well into the new millennium, and you couldn't get that content portable until roughly when the iPhone became ubiquitous. A lot of content at the time was simply the newspaper or national TV station, on the web. It was only later that you could virally share awful content that was formatted like good content.

Now that isn't to say that just because something is a newspaper, it is good content, far from it. But quality has definitely collapsed, overall and for the legacy outlets.

	▲	bee_rider 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I am not quite 40, but not that far off. I can’t really imagine being a young adult during their era where newspapers fell apart and online imitators emerged, experiencing that process first-hand, and then coming out of that ignorant of the poor media environment. Maybe the handful of years made a big difference.

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neom 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Could be true but if so I'd guess you're off by a generation, us 40 year "old people" are still pretty digital native.

I'd guess it's more a type of cognitive dissonance around caretaker roles.

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balamatom 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Many people were taught language-use in a way that terrified them. To many of us the Written Word has the significance of that big black circle which was shown to Pavlov's dog alongside the feeding bell.