[soneca]

Other platforms never leveraged opinions, pictures, life facts from people I know, like friends, family, acquaintances, coworkers, etc to induce behavior change.

And things change a lot with scale. Even if the intent or the principle is the same, dynamics are different if it is in a scale orders of magnitude larger.

I don’t think we should be dismissing new understandings of how social media affect our lives on the grounds that other media in the past tried to do the same.

[FooHentai]

Putting aside for a moment the much tighter feedback loop and way more in-depth metrics that allow much greater tuning and targeting...

With broadcast media, you can turn off the TV, radio, or put down the magazine. The social punishment cost of this is limited - If someone asked you about current affairs or the latest show etc, you might have to deal with being out of the loop.

But with smartphones and social media, everyone's a content publisher and it's all intertwined. Stepping back/checking out has a much higher social cost as you're not reachable and you're gonna miss those life updates from friends and family if you're not sitting on the same communication channels as them.

[godelski]

Simply, your TV doesn't turn back on and tell you that all your friends are watching a certain show. When you turn your TV off, it is off.

[adamsea]

Don’t give them ideas! ;)