What will social media be remembered for?

I think there will be a flurry of academic papers examining how people think about the world around them within this decade.

In media studies, there is a figure called Marshall McLuhan. He coined the phrase “the medium is the message.”

Basically, any new tech (the medium) will change the very way we think (message) about our world. For example, when travel by train became mainstream, the world literally shrank in the minds of the people. The medium of the train changes the very way we see the world.

I think we are still at a point where we don’t fully know how it has changed us. Sure, we speculate about things like “Twitter brain” and populism. But we are not at a point where definitive statements can be made.