In what way has social media changed human communication?

Every gain social media brought arrived with a matching loss

Question: In what way has social media changed human communication?
Position‹3 of 3: Social media has changed human communication, but for neither better or worse.
Argument‹2 of 2: Every gain social media brought arrived with a matching loss

The argument

Proponents of this position accept that social media produced real gains and real harms, and argue that the two are so closely paired that no overall verdict survives. The clearest case is reach. The same property that lets a person maintain a friendship across a continent also lets a careless remark travel to people it was never meant for. Reach cannot be granted selectively; a network that carries affection across distance carries embarrassment and malice the same distance at the same speed. The pairing holds for the other changes as well, on this account. Lowering the cost of speaking gives a hearing to people who previously had none, and it gives the same hearing to those with nothing worth saying and to those acting in bad faith. Making an audience permanently available supports people who would otherwise be alone, and it removes the solitude in which they used to think before answering. Keeping a written record of exchanges helps memory and accountability, and it means that a remark made in one mood can be produced years later in another. Proponents therefore resist the demand to total these up. The gains and the losses are not separate effects that happen to have arrived together and might in principle be separated by better design or better manners; they are the same property described from two sides. Someone who wants the reach without the exposure, or the openness without the noise, is asking for a network with a feature removed that cannot be removed, because the feature is what produces both. The reasonable conclusion, on this view, is that communication has become different in ways that cut both directions at once, and that confident claims of improvement or decline are usually produced by attending to one side of the pair and ignoring the other.

Premises

[P1]The gains social media produced and the harms it produced arise from the same properties of the medium: reach, a low cost of speaking, constant availability and a permanent record. [P2] Such a property cannot be granted selectively, so the benefit and the harm it produces cannot be separated by design or by manners. [P3] Claims of overall improvement or overall decline are produced by attending to one side of such a pair and ignoring the other. [C] No overall verdict of better or worse can be sustained, because every gain arrived with a matching loss.

Counter-arguments

Opponents reply that pairing is not the same as balance. Two effects can share a cause and still be wildly unequal in weight, and the argument gives no reason to think the gains and harms of reach are comparable in size. A medium that reunites separated families and also enables harassment is not thereby neutral; it requires the harder work of saying which effect is larger and for whom. The objection also disputes that the pairs are inseparable, pointing out that the terms on which reach is granted are design choices rather than natural properties, and that different choices have produced visibly different results.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Opponents hold that attributing gains and harms to the same abstract properties conceals how much depends on the particular terms on which a network grants them. [Rejecting P2] Those terms are design choices rather than fixed features of any network, so a property can in fact be granted selectively. [Rejecting P3] Noticing that two effects share a cause does not establish that they are equal in weight, so a verdict can rest on comparing their size rather than on ignoring one of them. [Rejecting C] If the paired effects are unequal, an overall verdict is available and the argument has shown only that reaching it is hard.