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Notes -
"we" "we" "we"....
We?
I think there's a very, very strong case to be made that the birth of the entire New Deal state and its subsequent massive growth (along with all its cousin forms of government in the mid 20th century, be it social democracy or communism or fascism or what have you) relied intensely on real time, overwhelming broadcast media. No radio+national periodicals+Hollywood movies+(later)broadcast tv -> no New Deal state. And more particularly, no polity that could even make sense to the New Deal state in the first place. And then throw in ever more centralized public schooling and the role of ever more dominant national university systems in finishing off the process of population... "massaging", let's say. Add in the draft and military service, too.
There's your "we". It has always been a technologically created Frankenstein monster... which, to be honest, is kind of the Western Enlightenment thing anyway. Can't have the Protestant reformation and the 30 years war without the printing press.
One deep problem "we" face right now, I think, is that current year American liberals in positions of social authority often very much have, I think, a "born on third, thought they hit a triple" sense of recent history, the 20th century, and the actual contours of sense making institutions in America in the 20th century. The stories of, say, the Red Scare in the 50s are still a memory they keep alive, but the similar role of the New Deal state in snuffing out conservative / traditionalist / reactionary broadcast media in the United States from the 30s until the 80's is largely unknown to them, and thus it seems like just a natural state of affairs, of them "being on the right side of history". So things like J Edgar Hoover's and FDRs actions against American "isolationists" - like here - or JFK's relationship to right wing radio - like here - are stories that are unfamiliar. Thus you end up with oblivious claims like, "Fox News and Rush Limbaugh were the aberration after normalcy, brought into being by the dastardly end of the Fairness Doctrine".
I think there's a similar undercurrent to the frustration with social media from people who desperately want to go back to the broadcast news environment I remember from the early 1980s as a kid. I recognize where it's coming from. And I know exactly why my conservative family abandoned its catechizing, scolding, and noxious (to them) values the moment they had the opportunity to have any other options for news, too.
I don't even disagree, at some object level, with all sorts of critiques about social media, their business models, and pervasive phones more broadly.
But we are living through a broad collapse of shared authority. Because they have been the unquestioned and unquestioning inheritors of a lot of that shared authority, this experience is apparently especially shocking to a lot of American liberals. Social media and new communication technologies certainly play a role in that process. But, at least to me, it seems like that collapse is a much bigger story, with a lot more moving parts, than just social media, and it's not so clear which direction casual arrows point.
I think this is a strong perspective, especially in light of previous perspectives going into earlier communication technology revolutions. One of the early motives / aspirations of the printing press, for example, was framed not in terms of 'think of what it could do for newspapers' but 'think of how many more Bibles the world could had.' An early advocacy group for radio were, again, religious interests thinking in terms of spreading the message / sermons / hymns to wider audiences.
The point here isn't about the susceptibility of religious types (though the parallels between ideologues who substitute ideology for religion is interesting), but rather that the 'current' dominant ideological consensus types often imagine new communication technologies as a way to spread their consensus, rather than challenge it. Twitter and Social Media would inspire pro-western/democratic/progressive/etc. movements. Telegraphs would allow power centers to better assert their control over distant parts of their countries, rather than help new power centers arise. International communism/socialism would allow the Soviets to lead the global revolution, rather than splintering and schisming as local communist leaders usurped the foreign advisor factions that often helped them rise to power. Etc. etc. etc.
Your 'born on third, believes they hit a triple' aligns to that historical parallel, as does the contemporary pushback on uncontrolled information parallels the historical examples. Once expanded, once-unquestionably dominant factions try to re-assert their authority by regulation / reconsolidation / attempts to reassert exclusive authority.
This thought had extremely different valences depending on your opinion of the commonfolk; the Church hierarchy was corrupt, yes. But they were also right that proliferation of the sacred text in the vernacular would cause an absolute riot of absolutely uncontrollable radicalism, with not-infrequently horrifying consequences.
The Church hierarchy was the original market for printed bibles.
Not in the vernacular.
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And they were wrong that such chaos wasn't worth it, and indeed that it could even potentially be avoided in any case.
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