Many of the more excited exponents of social media would have us believe that it is fundamentally changing the way we, and indeed society as a whole, functions.

A couple of Stanford academics would have us believe that it's not new at all.  Indeed they believe that the 17th and 18th centuries experienced similar booms in communication.

“In the 17th century, conversation exploded,” says Anaïs Saint-Jude, director of the BiblioTech program at Stanford University. “It was an early modern version of information overload.”

As the proverb goes

The more things change, the more they stay the same