French modernists were alarmed, inspired by newspaper's voracious dynamism

On one hand, one could think "oh, the current social network bashing is just the same doom and gloom reaction to more communication, it will pass".

On the other hand, if you know well the period, the newspapers of the time - which were closer to the tabloids of today, but worse - did a lot to stir hatred of foreigners, of Jews, of Poor, and contributed massively in causing wars, colonialism and pogroms.

Emile Zola published "J'accuse !" in a newspaper, but it was newspapers who stirred rabid antisemitism everywhere.

Note that the article is not taking the simplistic position that, because 19th century French writers decried the emergence of the newspaper, and 21st century contemporary thinkers decry the dominance of social media, that the latter should be dismissed. It's more nuanced than that, and it's really mostly an accounting of how those Modernists thought about newspapers, with a little bit of "let's consider a modern example..." at the end.

One thing I'd like to point out, though, is that very common argument by which one waves away concerns about social media today because, in the past, Socrates said reading is bad, and Mallarmé said newspapers are bad, is really a canard for two reasons.

First, because the social media is not reading, or newspapers, it's a different thing altogether, and in any case what happened in the past does not strictly determine a new case in the present or the future.

Second, because I'm fairly certain Mallarmé and Proust and Baudelaire would probably look at the world newspapers created, and say "I was right about newspapers all along". It did create yellow journalism, it did create tabloids, it did redefine truth, and recalibrate leisure, and it did create doomscrolling, and make people think in different—and not necessarily better—ways. Technology changes the world, and people adapt to it. After the fact of that change, the world normalizes, and new generations can't conceive of any prior alternative way of being. But, that does not mean the change was an improvement.

As a consequence, it may be categorically incorrect for us to even try to evaluate these historical positions from our modern perch. Maybe all we can do is listen to what people living through that change said, and take it as read, pun intended.

It’s not a coincidence.

>> The prospect of paper-based augmented books also holds out the possibility of revolutionary combinations of text, image and sound that would recast the boundaries of literary art.

Sounds like a solution in search of a problem, or worse - the sort of kidutainment geegaws you find in modern libraries.

Of course if you set the baseline expectation at Baudelaire’s or Balzac’s writings then it’s true that newspapers heralded an age of barely sentient readers consuming nonsense written by moronic and corrupt journalists.

Because the vast majority of the population, including those working for newspapers, are dumber and less virtuous relative to the 99.9th percentile of notable writers… by definition.

Edit: The real question is why would anyone set their expectations so high?