The big difference was that the damage was largely limted to those forums. There simply wasn't a critical mass of people worth influencing online, and mass culture lay elsewhere.
The hot jokes of the day turned up amongst Wall Street traders, probably spread by phone. Not Internet forums such as Reddit, 4chan, or Facebook. (You'd find occasional mentions of this in various news stories of the time.)
What's changed now is that the heart of media is online, and there are people who've realised this and are trying very hard to influence it. The period while different factions are sorting out what works, and various gatekeepers, including Google, Factbook, Twitter, and even, yes, our own Hacker News, sort out what their power and responsibility are, is going to be fairly chaotic (and has been). Much as in earlier periods of media transition: printing press, pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, radio, cinema, television, talk radio, cable.
Almost every period of new-media introduction has seen tremendous social and political upheaval. Many quite violent.
The hot jokes of the day turned up amongst Wall Street traders, probably spread by phone. Not Internet forums such as Reddit, 4chan, or Facebook. (You'd find occasional mentions of this in various news stories of the time.)
What's changed now is that the heart of media is online, and there are people who've realised this and are trying very hard to influence it. The period while different factions are sorting out what works, and various gatekeepers, including Google, Factbook, Twitter, and even, yes, our own Hacker News, sort out what their power and responsibility are, is going to be fairly chaotic (and has been). Much as in earlier periods of media transition: printing press, pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, radio, cinema, television, talk radio, cable.
Almost every period of new-media introduction has seen tremendous social and political upheaval. Many quite violent.
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