I don't know if anybody really thought this about the Internet back in the early days, say the 1980s, when networks were mostly restricted to academic institutions, large corporations and banks, and military communications:
The military had in past decades (60s and 70s) funded a lot of research into a networked system that would hopefully allow communications to survive a nuclear war, not exactly a utopian future vision:
Few if any were thinking that networking was going to lead to some social utopia due to the ease of communication among groups of people online - although ease of information sharing was recognized as a big plus in academics, at least. The introduction of the bulletin board system, and then usenet, mostly seemed to be about technically savvy people sharing information, some games, etc.
Then came the commercialization of the internet in the 1990s, the sale of ads, the rise of engagement metrics, and realization that there was nothing quite as effective as outrage porn (i.e. 'look at these terrible people and what they're doing! Tell everyone what you think about it!' )for drawing repeat users to your site. That's really when it went all sour.
I think the whole 'the Internet will bring people together in a beneficial way' theme was just a revisionist history put out by the PR people at outfits like Twitter and Facebook to put a patina of do-gooderness over what was essentially a predatory business model. I don't think such views were being widely promoted in the 1980s or early 1990s, at least I can't seem to find any such optimistic articles from that period.
https://networkencyclopedia.com/networking-history-1980/
The military had in past decades (60s and 70s) funded a lot of research into a networked system that would hopefully allow communications to survive a nuclear war, not exactly a utopian future vision:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/ARPANET
Few if any were thinking that networking was going to lead to some social utopia due to the ease of communication among groups of people online - although ease of information sharing was recognized as a big plus in academics, at least. The introduction of the bulletin board system, and then usenet, mostly seemed to be about technically savvy people sharing information, some games, etc.
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-we-talk-online-a-history-o...
Then came the commercialization of the internet in the 1990s, the sale of ads, the rise of engagement metrics, and realization that there was nothing quite as effective as outrage porn (i.e. 'look at these terrible people and what they're doing! Tell everyone what you think about it!' )for drawing repeat users to your site. That's really when it went all sour.
I think the whole 'the Internet will bring people together in a beneficial way' theme was just a revisionist history put out by the PR people at outfits like Twitter and Facebook to put a patina of do-gooderness over what was essentially a predatory business model. I don't think such views were being widely promoted in the 1980s or early 1990s, at least I can't seem to find any such optimistic articles from that period.