That's even too pessimistic. In the pre-Canter & Siegel days[1], we saw USENET and thought it would be wonderful if it entered every house, because it would elevate the general level of discourse. How optimistic was that?
With hindsight, it turns out people have more of an influence on a medium than the medium does on the people.
[1] for memory: when nearly everyone on USENET was highly geeky and it was aggressively non-commercial, the former due to barriers to access and the latter due to trying to stay under the radar of the organisations which were footing the long-distance bills.
(one of the best discussion media I'm on is pre-USENET, or nearly so. Unfortunately it has no ouija gateway, so it's been losing members to organic attrition: cancer, heart disease, etc., more rapidly than the epigonoi have been adopting.)
With hindsight, it turns out people have more of an influence on a medium than the medium does on the people.
[1] for memory: when nearly everyone on USENET was highly geeky and it was aggressively non-commercial, the former due to barriers to access and the latter due to trying to stay under the radar of the organisations which were footing the long-distance bills.
(one of the best discussion media I'm on is pre-USENET, or nearly so. Unfortunately it has no ouija gateway, so it's been losing members to organic attrition: cancer, heart disease, etc., more rapidly than the epigonoi have been adopting.)