I think the movie The Social Network was responsible for bringing this into the public consciousness, and constructing it to some extent. It kind of framed the discussion about the software industry for at least a decade.
I think that’s maybe reversed. The Social Network was telling a narrative through a contemporary lens, and part of the reason it became a phenomenon was because it hit on something people were already feeling. It may have helped a lot of people better articulate their own unease. I know I had already identified the anxieties in myself, and started discussing the potential negative impacts to social cohesion and political polarization, as these things were already fairly stark to anyone who was interested in exploring them. Although, I am not a CS grad, but rather Media Studies, so I had been primed to look for unrest and fraying of social fabric as a result of the communications revolution of the internet, just generally. So maybe mine isn’t the best benchmark perspective on this after all?
