Social media does sound like a decent theory though. To your point, the issues plaguing the US ( and indeed the world ) have not changed that much over the past four decades. What did change is relative access to information, which exacerbated and maybe even hastened some trends. The small factors were always there, but were not as commonly seen for a variety of reasons ( social stigma, exposure to media, 'toughen up' message from society being but a few examples off the top of my ehad ). And even now, we only are aware of it as a potential trend due to social media exposure ( in this case, HN ). Would we be as aware of it even 10 years ago?