Study the works of Hadley Cantril, Harold Lasswell, Paul Lazarsfeld and other figures of the era and one will see that, like Minow’s 1961 television speech, the very concerns we claim today are unprecedented outcomes of social media are merely the age-old issues that arise every half century with the debut of a major new telecommunications technology.
Today social media represents the latest technological inflection point and once again we are grappling with all of the same questions we have confronted roughly every 50 years.