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I feel these constructs were always present (compare the behavior of a pack of wolves vs a lone wolf) but in our age they're large reinforced by the "pack" being orders of magnitude larger. See how lynch works in social media: someone gets accused of something, then an army of disgusted users carries on the attack, which is not only virtual today. Individual conversation in these circumstances is not possible: you're not talking to individuals, but to a Mob, an animal with it's own behavior and very limited reasoning abilities.

The communication with bots and computer systems that are designed to interact with humans and equipped with the so-called "AI" is of similar nature: it seems there is some exchange, but it's very shallow and limited by the abilities of the receiving end - you can never transmit anything new, anything that the system is unable to understand. Continued use of such systems might have hard to predict consequences.




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