… Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter are many things at once—a modern railroad crossed with a modern telephone network, mixed with a modern phone book, on top of a modern Borgesian library. Above all, social media are a mechanism for allowing people to find like-minded individuals and to form groups with them. To a technologist such as Mark Zuckerberg, this characteristic seemed to promise a new age of transnational peace and moderation (not to mention: profit). But to a social psychologist, it sounded like a machine for injecting public discourse with ideological steroids.
The social psychologists were right. CONT.
Derek Thompson, The Atlantic