Fair point on the second. About the first, while we've always had places where content is reinforced (mass for churches is a great example), it's not something

Fair point on the second. About the first, while we've always had places where content is reinforced (mass for churches is a great example), it's not something we compulsively check every 5 minutes. There are orders of magnitude of difference between reaching an audience once a week and doing so dozens of times a day in small bursts. Even television couldn't reach that amount of repetition - maybe 24 hour news channels could, for people that keep their tvs as background noise and stay at home, but even that is a somewhat recent development. And we now know that recurrent spaced repetition is key to reinforcing an idea (is what many learning programs are based on, like Duolingo).