Absolutely. It's part of a very elaborate society-wide system that went online during the 2nd half of the XX century, for the purpose of establishing a global ingroup. You can see it working today as the participation-ensuring building block of the contemporary "attention economy", which is based on the democratization of the same technology, namely the tools for creating convincing intermedia narratives.
What's new about it is that as the means of creating the requsite affective environment of hyperreality ("engagement") gradually became available not only to nation-states but to private parties (down to the individual amateur influencer starting with no political agenda), they managed to interpose themselves as the very means of our critique of themselves.
Which on the meta level is a genius, as it establishes whole new channels for inter-reality exchange (a.k.a. cultural osmosis) on a first-come-first-serve basis, knowledge arbitrators love those. Not everyone necessarily finds it too comfy to find themselves in the same ecosystem as said ingroup though. Hence also the equally elaborate evolution in faux-antisystemic reaction since the turn of the century (while they try to bury the potential of technology as means of critique and bottom-up social reengineering.)