Someday I need to research this more, but a lot of people are blaming the decline in institutions, social connectedness, etc. on smartphones and the post-Facebook internet. Yet, it seems like the decline in institutions and social connectedness was well underway in the ‘90s and early 2000s, before the internet pervaded everyday life, and that from the mid-’70s to the ‘90s is when the biggest changes took place.
I could be misremembering though.
Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone is a book that is precisely about “the decline in institutions, social connectedness, etc.” Most of its text constitutes a discussion of how this decline manifests and what was likely to have caused it.
It was published in 2000, and its final-thoughts chapter includes a throwaway mention of “this Internet thing seems to be getting big, maybe it’ll turn out to matter to social-connectedness stuff, too soon to tell.”
So…yeah. It’s not smartphones and Twitter. Not entirely, anyway, and probably not mostly.
(Putnam thinks it’s a concatenation of things but mostly TV, for whatever that’s worth.)