predicting how marketers and corporate power will behave, basically 0 points, these people lived through the 80s. Predicting that it would lead to isolation and myopia, fuck, full marks, dammit.

ah, shitburgers.

If you're in the comments for the download:

https://www.webuse.org/pdf/DiMaggioEtAl-SocialImplications2001.pdf

No wonder I couldn't find this piece when I went looking for it!

Cyberspace offers the promise of a community in the form of social media websites, applets, games, etc.
But these are all just facsimiles of community. They are not a valid replacement for face to face human interaction and should not be treated as such, contrary to what many social media entrepreneurs would wish us to believe.

With each layer of abstraction you introduce in the communication process you lose more and more. Social media channels are some of the most abstracted forms of communication you can have.
When you video call your friend you get to see them through the less-than-crisp resolution of their camera, often with latency and poor audio, and only from a static fixed angle.
When you phone call your friend you don't get to see their body language or facial expressions.
When you text your friend, you don't even get the intonation of their voice. We have emojis, but while useful they lack nuance, and unappealing to many people because of that.

When you interact with a friend over a social media channel, you don't even know if that person is real or not. You're also going to be interacting with a very mediated form of their persona that they've tailored for public presentation. It is in my opinion that communication channels that are this degraded are inherently dehumanizing, and little more than a parody of human interaction.

Now it is time to make fun of me for posting the above on a social media website.