This question is only meaningful given a timescale. I doubt you need the answer at any of the five year, hundred year, thousand year scales, but they would differ completely, making the existing question meaningless. Why is this the right place to begin an essay? You should state an idea, and show how you can develop it.

They couldn't see a change at all, in fact, if they were born after it. But those who lived both before and after the development of telegraphy were right that it changed the world. Less than the Net does, because the Net connects people, not places, across the scale of humanity rather than across even extensive geography. But enough for the old-timers to have been completely right, a proposition you seem to be working yourself up to denying.

On a longer time scale, and without reference to evanescent details of unimportant technology, yes, tentatively. But that's not what you're doing here.

These are the relatively trivial details that come from not reimagining the scale of human interconnection and the resulting changes in the structure of social life. Once you expand the time scale and begin to focus on the consequences of: (1) the pervasive change as individual brains develop in coexistence with the Net from birth; and (2) the consequences of complete interconnection of all members of the species, which is heretofore unachieved by organisms on Earth, you can see why your way of thinking about the question you pose won't get you anywhere.

Yes. But these are merely transitional phenomena. The issues that matter have to do with the presence or absence of something we have quaintly referred to as human freedom once the Net actively socializes every human mind and potentially constantly surveils every human body and registers every human thought.

This is an essay that more or less successfully avoids discussing its subject, primarily by pretending, whenever it senses the need to get to the root of the matter, that it is instead an essay about someone called Jean Beaudrillard, who as a matter of fact didn't know shit about anything having to do with the Net.

I think the best way forward is to drop that stuff where it belongs and make an actual attempt to think about your nominal subject. Given an appropriate context for historical speculation, which means using meaningful timescales and considering phenomena of larger than dust-mote size, what does the Net do to the nature of human social life? Such an inquiry doesn't lead to a single answer: it leads to the recognition of multiple possible futures, some desirable and some undesirable. We may then try to isolate the threads of causation that lead to more or less desirable outcomes, and attempt to intervene in present social processes with the intention of improving the probability of longer-term outcomes we can celebrate rather than fearing.

Such a process of thought is possible. Some of us who had the earliest possible opportunity to do that thinking, who have decades of experience in doing it, and who were expert in the technologies involved from the beginning, have already begun acting to achieve a better future. You've spent some months at least in contact with the nature of their thought, taught to you first hand by one of those who began the journey at the beginning. Wouldn't it make more sense to write in some sort of contact with those ideas, rather than throwing out all the work already done in order to write about some foam on the surface of the ocean called "Instagram," now merely another arm of Facebook, and some nonsense calling itself Jean Baudrillard?