While I personally abbor - and abjure - nearly all social media (Medium being my sole exception) we have to remember that people have been creating scare stories about new technologies since the birth of human history. Camp fires made us soft - real people in my day were tough and didn't need fires to keep warm throughout the winter. Cooking food made us soft - when I was small, we chewed tough raw flesh for hours and it did us good! The invention of writing was a catastrophe; no longer do we have to memorize the old stories and repeat them with as much fidelity as we can manage. And so on and so on.

Yes, modern media is usually dire because ordinary people don't want anything better. That's why most (but not all) radio programming is dross. It's why most (but not all) TV shows are absolute rubbish. It's why nearly every movie is utter garbage. And it is why social media is a mindless swamp. But the problem isn't the technology: it is us.

Meanwhile, the tiny percentage of useful content enables the tiny percentage of thoughtful people to acquire more information, learn more about the universe, and even (at times) reach out to communicate with a few other like-minded thoughtful people.

Ordinary people will always prefer to squat in the gutter; technology cannot rectify nor much amplify the situation. But technology does bring huge gains for the tiny percentage of the population of Earth that uses it to advantage. We must always be careful not to throw the metaphorical baby out with the equally metaphorical bathwater.