NEW YORK: Once upon a time, there was a brief outage on some social media platforms. It got fixed. The end. On the face of it, kind of a boring story.

But the widespread attention given to the blanking of Meta’s Facebook, Instagram, Threads and Messenger platforms on March 6 suggests another, perhaps less obvious tale: the one that shows that social media platforms, like the books or newspapers or insert-medium-here of other times in history, matter more than just being entertaining pastimes.