Herman Hesse's novel "the glass bead game" discusses a movement he calls The age of the Feuilleton When a sports writer is asked for his opinion on nuclear physics, and a chef might expound on the relative merits of gay love and modern dance. At the time I first read this (the 1970s) it felt like a very odd artifice, an unlikely situation: who the hell would care about this?

But in the context of Facebook, insta-famous, I think Hesse might have been on the money: we've descended into a rats-nest of opinion-that-matters coming from D list celebrities, and we ignore real ideas, because they're just too hard to cope with.

I think FB owns some of this: the idea we glom onto people and give giant thumbs-up signals to the ones who say things we can relate to even if we are doing a thumbs-up to a picture of a starving Kid: we reduced the mental effort to participate to a single button click, and rank people by influence which is judged by engagement which is judged by likes

So I'd reduce the impact of Facebook down to likes -This idea may have been birthed elsewhere, but Facebook is where it exploded to worldwide relevance.