> I'm not saying he's entirely wrong, but a lot of what he's saying sounds very much like how TV was once described.

Calling attention to Neil Postman’s __Amusing Ourselves to Death__ is the usual rejoinder to a statement like this. But, Daniel J. Boorstin’s __The Image__[1][2], published in 1962, just about perfectly presages the outcomes of 2016 – 2017 vis-à-vis social media; I cannot commend it enough.

(N.B television (especially with news shows) is also both a form of, and antecedent to what we call social media.)

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Image-Guide-Pseudo-Events-America/dp/...

[2] http://www.transparencynow.com/boor.htm, (Disclaimer: I don't know anything about this site, having just discovered it a few seconds ago, but it provides a nice summary of the book).