This piece originally appeared in National Review.
To judge from the prophets of the telegraph, world peace was just around the corner. The 1865 International Telegraph Conference dubbed itself a “veritable Peace Congress.” Nikola Tesla, hard at work on a wireless version, predicted that he would go down in history as “the inventor who succeeded in abolishing war.” And in 1897, the sociologist Charles Horton Cooley, entranced by the telegraph, telephone, and newspaper, envisioned the growing network of communications that he dubbed “social media” “levelling before it the barriers of ignorance, blind hostility and constraint of place, and permitting man to organize his higher sympathetic and aesthetic impulses.” Humanity would rise to a new level of fellow feeling and open-mindedness; reason and knowledge would at last have their day.
Well, that didn’t work out. More than a century later, the chaos unleashed by social media and digital communication, whatever benefits they have had besides, is too obvious to belabor: an endless frenzy of distraction; an obsession with fleeting and frivolous fads; an explosion in paranoia and suspicion, matched by a tremendous dissemination of propaganda. Mark Zuckerberg might still maintain sunny hopes for social media — he predicted in 2017 that Facebook would build “a global community that works for everyone” — but does anyone else buy this vision anymore?
Still, if it’s easy in retrospect to scoff at the utopian dream that easier and faster communication would save the world, it’s harder to say why these predictions didn’t come to pass. What is it about the technology, or ourselves, that has so often made digital connection a cesspool of narcissism, vituperation, and groupthink?
