Broadcast communications is an inherently rivalrous space, and the ability for any
one person to reach others means
of necessity that they are preempting anyone
else from doing so. Given present population and life expectancy, the amount of time that can be
equitably granted any individual on Earth by others is ... a small fraction of a second. The likelihood that any of my online utterances is seen by more than a few hundreds of people is very slight. I'd have a similar audience at any crowded city street corner, or on a university quadrangle.
Worse, the existence of such a channel incentivises low-value ways to fill it. Advertising, robocalls, spam, phishing attempts, and fraud. It's somewhat enlightening to look over the Greek and Roman pantheon to realise that Fama was interested only in trumpeting the pronouncements of the gods, not considering their value or veracity, and that Mercury was the god not only of messengers, but of tricksters and thieves. Herbert Melville's The Confidence Man, from which the modern term derives, was set on the first great superhighway of the United States, the Mississippi River.
Improvements in communications technology have much the same effect has handing out party favours to a room full of five-year-olds. Communications and intelligence isn't improved, though the noise floor is considerably raised.
My point isn't that a few days' additional improvement on weather forecasts have no value. It is that in order to achieve this, MILLIONS OF TIMES increases in computer power are necessary. Which is to say that information-processing advances of an extreme degree deliver very, very modest additional benefits.
Niche artists and businesses used to find an audience the old-fasioned way: locally, because of a phenomenon known as "friction". It cost too much to move goods (or audiences) long distances, so provisioning was local. It wasn't until the rise of the factory system, mechanised transportation, branding, and advertising, that it became possible to sell goods over a range of more than a few villages or towns (with rare exceptions). The consequence now is that:
- Every manufacturer of a durable good is competing on a global basis, and production has a strong tendency to shift to where labour and environmental regulations can be most heavily suppressed.
- Ephemeral production, as with software, video entertainment, music, fashion, banking, and propaganda centralises to where the non-ephemeralisable components of production are most suitably concentrated, giving rise to toponymic global centres (with possible variations based on language, culture, and regulation or legal jurisdictions): Hollywood and Bollywood, Nashville and Motown, Silicon Valley, New York / London / Frankfurt / Tokyo / Shanghai, Milan and Paris, Moscow and Macedonia.
Cellphones are so gunked with junk calls that actual lost hikers will ignore incoming calls from unknown numbers, a problem communications service providers have seen coming for years. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29003383)
I'm not saying that there are no benefits. But that there are also costs and consequences and counterveiling trends, and that many of the so-called gains have been offeset by losses either in the same domain or elsewhere.