Last week, I had the great pleasure of presenting my work at the International Conference on Social Media and Society (#SMSociety2017), hosted by the esteemed team at the Social Media Lab at Ryerson University. While in attendance, I listened to a fantastic keynote by Lee Rainie, the director of Internet and Policy Research at the Pew Research Center. His keynote, titled “The Reckoning for Social Media” focused on the research work conducted by the Pew Internet and Technology research center, about how social media have changed the relationship of people to each other and to public institutions. Some of his findings were disheartening such as, for example, recent research that shows that people polled in the US are experiencing declining trust in academic institutions, or that people are becoming more polarized in their political views. Other findings were more hopeful, such as the fact that there is substantial reciprocity across social media platforms.

Lee Rainie reminded us that though eroding trust in institutions, the presence of weaponized information and an environment of information overload which creates balkanization and hyper-partisanship can make us feel that the internet is a “failed state”, it is important to understand the new online information environment in the context of the history of information. For perspective, he turned to the work of foundational historian Elizabeth Eisenstein. Her work on the printing press is exceptional, and helps us to understand social media in a more nuanced way. Eisenstein wrote that as the printing press first enabled the wide dissemination of information, it initially resulted in the spread of what could be called the fake news of the time. Superstitious texts, pornography, folklore and the like, were originally the firsts texts to spread far and wide. It’s difficult to believe now, but the printing press also created an environment of information overload that had to be overcome through innovations like the dewey decimal system in libraries that allowed people to find the information they needed (as Clay Shirky reminds us).

Over time, new standards and practices developed around the availability of print media, and people were able to reap great benefits from the free flow of information. Eisenstein suggests, for example, that the Renaissance and the Reformation would both be impossible without the printing press. This, I believe, is why Rainie ended his keynote with a nod to Eisenstein’s work. It is true to say that we are at an inflection point for social media – a reckoning of sorts, in which we are seeing several negative unintended consequences: fake news, weaponized information, and trolling, to name only three. But these negative outcomes may only be growing pains in this medium, and as we learn to overcome these challenges, we may find ourselves at the other side of a new communication revolution. Only future communication historians in retrospect will be able to say for sure what the outcome of these technologies will ultimately be. But in the meantime, maybe we can begin to ask how we can influence a positive information revolution rather than falling into a trap of cynicism and despair.