Sure Michael, glad to:

American culture, since the advent of radio, TV, and especially advertising and branding in the 50’s is designed to destroy people’s sense of themselves and replace it with entertainment and consumer products. This is the”Fat, Dumb, and Happy Formula” for keeping a society stable — Machiavelli would be proud. These videos describe it:

Social Media, YouTube, games, etc is just an extension of what’s been going on for over half a century — train our youth to be good consumers and corporate workers, brainwash them with simplistic views of the world to disarm them as effective active citizens, and exhaust their energy with constant addiction to frivolous entertainment and consumer products, and instill in them an “us and them” sports oriented mentality so they are constantly fighting EACH OTHER instead of the real enemy (e.g. corporate and political power)— all while policy makers are free to do what they want because the population is ignorant and distracted. And of course make money off the whole thing in scale.

So social media hasn’t failed, quite the opposite. It’s the next step in the evolution of the more of the same. (Meet the new boss, same as the old boss). Ever read Tim Wu’s “Master Switch” — good book on how new media technologies over history are basically used for the same thing — money and power. I laud the US’s efforts in the early 1900’s to ensure a certain amount of public broadcasting and fair and balanced material on the airways, but that’s been largely dismantled as an electorate who cares more about decoys such as gay marriage is clueless about what’s going on.

I like the end of this video, describing how the strategy to neuter a powerful Internet was to let junk rule:

(These vids are all part of a playlist).