It’s often said that science fiction accurately predicts most technological changes while whiffing completely on the social consequences of that change.
When the Internet was first written about, it was most often cast as a tool for the new enlightenment, where education and information would be democratized. I don’t think anyone really understood how it would lead to a completely personalization of information and people segregating themselves into information bubbles which become mutually reinforcing and never overlap.
Probably the closest example I can think of is Ender’s Game, where Peter and Valentine manipulated the nets using demagoguery into electing Peter into leader of the world. But even that, I think didn’t go far enough into the decentralized, completely fragmented media landscape of today. It’s more reminiscent of the blogging era of the 2000s where each person set up their own site and you had to go to a site to receive information.
Are there any other authors who you feel are especially prescient about the modern social media landscape?
The term “flash mob” was invented by author Larry Niven. He posited not only universal telecommunication but also cheap teleportation. So people would not only hear about an event but also decide to go there, either to participate or just gawk, as the event was on-going. His stories predated today’s social media-driven revolutions (e.g., Arab Spring) by three or four decardes
Vernor Vinge’s True Names(1981) had a fair bit to say about the implications of anonymity on the internet, with the protagonist a member of a criminal group on a rough equivalent of the dark web. Doxxing and the threat thereof was a theme, with the title alluding to the fact that if you were able to determine the ‘true name’ (i.e. RL identity) of one of these online personas you would be able to ruin/threaten to ruin that person, as well as the blackmail implications.
I don’t know that it got into it alot, and it’s been a long time since I read it, but Earth, by David Brin, published in 1990, had a scene in which one of the protagonists were checking their news-feeds.
In this scene, it talked about how they got most of their feeds from areas and sources that they chose, but a certain percentage of the news came from essentially random sources outside of the readers control.
Didn’t force them to read it, but it made sure that they were at least exposed to differing ideas from those that they wished to subscribe to, essentially to avoid the exact sort of bubble we are talking about.
I think the popularity and vast influence of social media is one of those future effects which SF writers couldn’t imagine. Certainly the internet (fast and bottomless access to knowledge) was expected and treated as the future normal. But not the twist of shallow ideas permeating human culture.
Its amusing for us to look back at cartoons and predictions of 100 years ago to see how wrong they were but they do usefully illustrate how little we can understand how things change.
Orson Scott Card also manages to predict reality tv and the navel gazing of internet videos in The Worthing Saga. His stories from Capitol have a very interesting take on video streaming.