There's a ton of truth to this, and it's something I've come to realise, strongly, especially over the course of past U.S. election cycle and subsequent developments.

Media are how society communicates, and if you change the messaging and control elements of a system, you're going to change its function, tremendously.

Mind, that's not a new concept, just one that I've finally grokked.

I've just run across Darnton and Ross's Revolution in Print: The Press in France, 1775-1800.

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/07/09/books/after-the-revolution...

Earlier, there's Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change:

http://www.worldcat.org/title/printing-press-as-an-agent-of-...

(The 1968 article inspiring this is a shorter synopsis of the concept: http://www.worldcat.org/title/some-conjectures-about-the-imp...)

Eisenstein worked significantly from McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy http://www.worldcat.org/title/gutenberg-galaxy/oclc/98079330...

Clay Shirky's formulation is "I study people on the Internet, which is to say, I watch people argue". His view is that the more people can communicate with one another, the more you can find someone you disagree with. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CEN4XNth61o (starting at ~2m)

https://www.xkcd.com/386

So:

1. This stuff matters. Tremendously.

2. The responses to technology are not uniformly good.

3. Media revolutions change societies. It's not a question of "how do we get back to status quo ante?", it's "what will be the new status quo".

4. See #2: #3's implications need not be an improvement.

5. This stuff is covered, in excruciating but vitally significant detail, in a massive amount of literature dating to the Ancient Greeks and before. All those Communications Studies majors you (and I) laughed at at Uni? There's actually a there there. (And if you want to catch up a bit: MOOC ICS (if you can find the series link): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NhbHHpKPQL4

6. This isn't, as some of the kids today are claiming, just old people getting old. It's kind of a big deal. It's not the first big deal, but it also helps put in perspective how earlier big deals were big deals. Like what happens, say, when net literacy increases from about 25% to upwards of 90%? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1848

7. Demagoguery and Fascism. The role of mass media in the spread of both is profound. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demagogue https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230800939_5

8. The power and draw of epistemic systems. As my friend Woozle pointed out: as communications gain in users and influence, they attract those who would seek to use them to personal, financial, or political advantage. There's almost an evolutionary cycle of this. https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5wg0hp/when_ep...

________________________________

More by way of a bibliography:

James Gleick, The Information.

Marshal McLuhan. Various.

MacKay, Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everyone

Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.

Jeremy Norman, The History of Information. A simply amazing website I've just stumbled across. The past 2.8 million years of information and media. Some 4,000+ articles, and 92 themes.
Bernays, Propaganda and Public Relations http://historyofinformation.com

Popper, The Great Transformation and others.

J.S. Mill, several.

Charles Perrow, Ordinary Accidents and Making America (I think).

Arnold Toynbee, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution.

I've been trying to organise my own thoughts on this, the best effort (a stream-of-consciousness rant some months back) to date -- not good, mind: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/t7qwp_va18sogdmm_xsslg