Tim Lee explains why readers who came of age before the rise of decentralized media are far less inclined to see its virtues than those who came of age during and after:

Intellectuals under about 35 have had access to the Web for their entire adult lives. Most of us rely on the Internet as our primary source of information about the world. We’ve all been practicing finding interesting content and sharing it with our friends for over a decade. Many of us are quite good at it.
In contrast, intellectuals over about 45 had already gotten used to a print-centric media diet by the time the Internet arrived. As a result, they didn’t adopt online reading habits with the same enthusiasm. When social media arrived, few of their peers were using it so they didn’t either. And as a consequence, they never developed the kind of Internet-filtering prowess that comes naturally to many people in my cohort.
The result is what we might call a social media singularity. As the Internet gets bigger and more complex, I and my peers see increasing richness and depth. In contrast, for cohorts who have been less engaged over the last decade, the Internet’s growing size and complexity only makes it all the more “incorrigibly hostile.”

And as Tim goes on to explain, it would be difficult for any one person to make herself an exception to the rule. We learn in groups, and the groups to which we belong tend to be composed of people much like ourselves. Tim’s post doesn’t just shed light on the use of social media. It offers insight into a number of “generation gap” phenomena, and why tastes and perceptions vary across groups defined by ethnic, professional, religious, and ideological affiliation, etc.