Technology

The dream was that social media would help revitalize the public sphere and support the kind of constructive political dialogue that your paper deems "vital to democratic life." That largely hasn't happened.

Their idea is basically that people need to be told the same things to what to believe in so that democracy can work as it's supposed to and social media is disrupting that with all the conspiracy shit, flame wars and polarization of opinions. The issue is that this common idea is fermented by the boomer generation. They grew up in really quite anomalous post war world when there was first time in human history basically monolithic mass media that people watched it AND had high trust in AND the system provided more for the masses more than it does now. Those then lead to to high societal inclusion and high social cohesion that again fed into the prosperity. Now we have fragmented information sphere and things are shit are shit, political center is hated by most and radicalism is once again rising.

However so called democracy or collective decision making in general itself does not rely on people not believing in crazy shit, not being fed the best possible validated information, or god forbid having unorthodox ideas of their own or developing factionalism or totally different reading on reality. It helps make it smoother and avoids violence, but that "smoothness of process" that boomers have come to expect is also why society in wider terms is politically stagnant and rotting. People seem to live in different realities, because in a sense we are, because our economic realities can be so different and decoupled form the mainstream narrative. It never didn't have to get this bad, but social media only a venting mechanism not the reason for the growing divides. The division in society and the general anguish is real IRL, it just takes forms of all kinds of irrational and counterproductive forms online. The problem isn't really that people are factional and can't agree with each other, it's that nobody can no longer agree with the monolithic unpopular political center that is holding on to power for dear life.