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Comment by snerbles | Hacker News Reader

One can argue that this isn't really anything new - look back at the media hype for war surrounding an explosion of a certain U.S. warship. In 1898. Amusing, how the most vaunted prize in journalism is named for one of the most famous perpetrators of yellow journalism.

Social media is merely a slimmer middle man in that frenzied feedback loop, and the legacy media is upset that their slice of the pie is shrinking.

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The difference is how we are connected now 100% with media (and mobile device notifications) where before people lived mainly unconnected and with cognitive "load" instead of cognitive offloading. Not saying that the past was better but rather than we need to build new cognitive/policy tools against new media.

> The difference is how we are connected now 100%

I think 100% is misleading.

You could say that a morning newspaper connected people 100% when that was a new thing. Phones/computers only connect us as often as we use them to connect.

For instance something like AR goggles with a constant ticker of information would connect us even more.

I think it's more accurate to simply say that we are more connected. In specifics that the 24 hour cycle of evening news and morning newspapers has changed into an on-demand system that pushes information to people that want to receive it and that anyone can pull it when they have free time.

The printing press was instrumental to the Protestant Reformation too, but I'm not sure social media is quite the same.

Or the way that religions dominated the attentions of earlier times--with the occasional social surplus being squandered on cathedral building, crusades, heresy and it's suppression, pilgrimages, self-mortification etc.

"Not new" != "not significant".

Facebook quite literally connects more people across a single platform than any medium in history. That logo is the most-seen image in the world right now.

And the history of media change shows that it is tremendously disruptive. Something today's new-media moguls seem to be only just starting to realise. Or at least, admit.

I hate this argument so much, any along the lines of "people have always said this". It's not true that just because something has been raised as a concern before that it can't possible be a concern now. The world changes, as do the circumstances for engaging it.

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