I guess the "so what" is the implication that we have not reached the
promises or potential of civilian digital communication systems. I
agree, and think what we have has instead made many areas of
information worse, fragmented and unreliable.
As for "who?", if you grew up the 80s of 90s you will remember the
daily, breathless grandiose proclamations of various government
digital literacy programmes. Selling the World Wide Web, the
Information Superhighway, Ubiquity and Universal Access was a
decade-long propaganda drive that laid the foundations for what it now
the "tech industry".
Of course there is much in the world that is over-promised, and
over-reaches. At some point people usually reconcile the reality with
the hype. With "tech" I think that has still not happened, and many
remain in a dream world, high on the fantasies they grew up with.
This is a rhetorical or satirical commentary on the fact that media technology, while having the superficial capacity for increasing access to and quality of information, often has the opposite effect of what one might expect despite that capacity. That is, it just as frequently and even more adeptly appears to embed and reinforce deeply pre-existing biases towards false -- even obviously so -- narratives which are comforting or reaffirm the believer's sense that they see through the confusion of world events.
The answers to "by whom", and "so what" questions are not going to be literal answers, just like "at what precise moment did you stop sleeping and become awake this morning" has no true answer, but would only invite a debate over the definitions of sleeping and waking. It's not meant to literally be a story about a time I was told something. I was told many things, by many people, in various forms, over a long period of time.
The comment is meant to provoke the reader to consider that technology -- far from giving man the ability to conquer his nature -- emanates from man's nature, is a servant to it, and can easily serve to reinforce and entrench it. Therefore, one ought to treat technological progress carefully, and not assume that it is equivalent to human progress.
