>In the 1860s, Charles Baudelaire bemoaned what we might now call doomscrolling: [...] The poet’s revulsion was widely shared in 19th-century France. Amid rapid increases in circulation, newspapers were depicted as a virus or narcotic responsible for collective neurosis, overexcitement and lowered productivity.

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.

And on the grasping hand, one could think they were right - so instead of defending social media by pointing at the past and saying it's "just the same doom and gloom reaction to more communication, it will pass", or - conversely - instead of claiming social media is a new and uniquely bad thing, we could perhaps consider that their observations were valid then, and are even more valid now; that we've been going down the wrong road for the past 100+ years, and social media is merely an incremental worsening of a mistake made so long ago, we can't even conceptualize correcting it now.

I’m totally fine saying newspapers, conceptually, are just net negative.

They are a tool that can be used for good or evil but largely inevitably end up in the hands of selfish commercial or political interests.

They had opium, we have fentanyl.

It's not all bad but it's more potent now by far.

>oh, the current social network bashing is just the same doom and gloom reaction to more communication, it will pass

One might ask if it wasn't just down hill from the tabloids to social media in our current time. I tend to think that the development from tabloids to radio, television and social media is actually a consistent and logical development. The aim has always been to generate as many readers / listeners / viewers and engagement as possible, and the possibilities have become increasingly effective and efficient thanks to digital information processing. However, the side effects that each new medium introduces are becoming more extreme.

I still can't get over the fact that there were Dreyfusard and anti-Dreyfusard bicycle racing newspapers.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_V%C3%A9lo

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'Auto

The anti-Dreyfusards won, put the Dreyfusards out of business by starting the Tour de France, and eventually went on to support Vichy.

edit: https://blog.nli.org.il/en/tour_de_france/

Any idea where I could get my hands on such records? Lately my voracious reading appetite has been encouraging me to seek out first hand accounts

> 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

Sure, but this is just as true of the earliest printed works in the 16th and 17th centuries. So this really is a fallacious argument unless you also think that we should be dispensing with freedom of the press in general.