How far have we gone?

I am saddened tonight at the thought of a six-year-old in an underground bunker.  And I'm not even over the Sandy Hook massacre yet.  How violent have we become?
  I've been reading an article in Smithsonian magazine by Ron Rosenbaum about Jaron Lanier. Lanier, the writer says, "was one of the creators of our current digital reality" and who "was an early advocate of making information absolutely free." Downloading artistic works, music sharing that bypasses the artist, for example, damages the whole economy which hurts the middle class in the main. He sees the direction that across-the-board freedom of all information combined with the anonymity that the internet enables allows us to escape responsibility for our words and actions.  Instead of a utopian ideal of the will of the masses lifting us above violence and individual hegemony, he sees a mob rule, "not an enabling of democracy, but an accretion of tribalism" and "slowly turning us into a nation of hate-filled trolls."
I am not intending to connect all the violence in our society to the internet, but the argument in this entire article (titled "The Spy Who Came In From The Cold 2.0") certainly sees some connection.
We have a great loosening of peer-control.  I am worried about how far we actually have gone in that direction.  Someone want to argue back with me?