I've seen some informal analysis that claims that the ubiquity of smartphones and the successful transition of the massive social networks to mobile is what specifically led to many of the alleged negative societal effects (increased political polarization, for example, although there are many other examples).
Of course you've seen such analysis, it's fairly ubiquitous.
But as the parent and the article argue, it's completely incoherent. Not that phones haven't given polarization and propaganda a bit of a push but because these things are just parts of long-term trends that need to be looked at. And a lot of the "social media opens people to evil" complaints came loudly from mainstream media who were understandably upset at loosing their semi-monopoly trend-setting (ie, propaganda).
Of course, a lot of the forces that effectively hacked social media were the extreme right, which I'd hardly a fan of. But this wasn't "a sudden rise in propaganda" but a relative democratization of propaganda. If you want a non-propagandistic way of disseminating information, you need to go much further back than 1990, probably look at a whole different method of communicating.
Of course you've seen such analysis, it's fairly ubiquitous.
But as the parent and the article argue, it's completely incoherent. Not that phones haven't given polarization and propaganda a bit of a push but because these things are just parts of long-term trends that need to be looked at. And a lot of the "social media opens people to evil" complaints came loudly from mainstream media who were understandably upset at loosing their semi-monopoly trend-setting (ie, propaganda).
Of course, a lot of the forces that effectively hacked social media were the extreme right, which I'd hardly a fan of. But this wasn't "a sudden rise in propaganda" but a relative democratization of propaganda. If you want a non-propagandistic way of disseminating information, you need to go much further back than 1990, probably look at a whole different method of communicating.