I think this has happened a lot. Some new technology makes an existing problem more obvious or more prevalent, and the problem is blamed on the technology. Technology may amplify social woes, but it certainly does not cause them.
You also see this a lot with the "cyber-bullying" crowd. Technology did not cause bullying, and technology cannot fix bullying. The only thing technology enables is for the bullies to act faster. Rumors can now spread through the entire school in minutes, rather than hours.
isn't speeding up and increasing the reach of bullying making bullying more powerful then? maybe a bad comparison: but isn't that like saying the truck didn't change the way we move stuff, it just allowed us to move more things, quicker.
It's more pervasive. If you're bullied at school but loved at home, it might be tolerable. But if you're being bullied via email or Facebook 24/7, you never get a chance to "decompress".
I suppose that depends on your theory of causation. =]
It's true that technology, perhaps barring technology that directly alters the human brain, can never cause any psychological or social change except via humans using it. But if, for example, people are unhappy when they frequently compare their lives to others, and a particular technology increases how likely they are to do so, I'd say that the technology has caused an increase in unhappiness, via the mechanism of increasing comparisons.
Can happen on the positive side also. I'm comfortable pointing to software as a "cause" for certain kinds of increases in productivity, even though of course it's only the fact that people are using it to do things that increases productivity.
