We point to the riots last summer, and while there are debates about how severe they are, we willfully ignore that there have been riots in the past, even much more pervasive and deadly ones, even with a significantly lower population and population density than we have now.
There's political divisiveness, but students aren't getting shot at Kent State, and the Weather Underground isn't blowing up bombs in Manhattan, and there are no open wars being fought between private armies, militias, and government forces in West Virginia. Maybe once upon a time people were as passionate about George McGovern as people are now about Hillary Clinton, but passions fade and people forget.
There will be implications for the direction of history based on social networks and open information exchange, but likely we won't recognize them until far in the future. I'm sure there were dozens of upstart anti-Catholic movements that preceded Martin Luther and had the advantage of the printing press but fizzled out into nothing are are forgotten to history before the circumstances led to his success, but we can't see the invisible failures, only the visible successes, so we try to take lessons there.