[keiferski]

I'm pretty skeptical of the idea that [recent technology] is to blame here, and not decades or centuries-long societal patterns. Especially when that technology is shaking up established "authorities" and calling their so-called expertise into question.

The fact that this seems particularly strong in Anglo and historically Protestant places and less in other developed countries suggests to me that this is more of a specific cultural phenomenon and less of a problem directly attributable to social media. But of course that's a much more complex topic and not something that you can wrap a trendy new nonfiction book around.

Social media is not like those earlier innovations. I think the best metaphor here is to imagine a public square in which people talk to each other. They debate ideas or put forth ideas that may not always be brilliant. They may not always be civil, but people can speak while others listen. Sometimes people are moved by persuasion or dissuasion. I think the Founding Fathers assumed that’s about the best we can hope for. Imagine one day, and I’ll call it 2009, that all changes. There’s no more public square. Everything takes place in the center of the Roman Colosseum. The stands are full of people who are there to see blood. That’s what they came for. They don’t want to see the lion and the Christian making nice; they want the one to kill the other. That’s what Twitter is often like.

The public square was emphatically not what media was like before social media. It was a locked-down space controlled by large corporations: newspapers, TV stations, and other institutions that told you what was acceptable to talk about and what wasn't. It wasn't a public square with equal access for all.

The Internet, just like the printing press in the 1500s-1600s, took that ability and spread it to millions of people that previously didn't have it. The results of the Gutenberg printing press were both good and bad, depending on your persuasion, but these types of "we need more restrictions on Internet publishing because old authorities are losing power" really sound like something that was said about the Gutenberg press when it started to spread information that called authority into question. It didn't work then, and it won't work now.