Gossip at scale
The Internet, smart phones, and social media (ISS) have set human communication back about 20,000 years. That is, we now rely more on gossip than we have since we lived in small tribes.
Is the web worse than broadcast TV? Worse then paper technology in 600? Worse than the printing press It seems to me the worse case here is the the web set us back to Father Knows Best in Black and White TV.
More to the point, how could information technology cause a reversal? Why is gossip considered a negative here? In every case technology shocks increase the bandwidth of gossip. But there may be nothing disruptive about gossip. The disruption generally comes from the common folk getting the new technology and hedging the elites, not necessarily a bad thing. The real fear, generally, is the elites freak out and cause real problems.
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