I see this sentiment a LOT. And I'm starting to think that it's not in any way about current day technologies or new media thingies, but solely about age.
That's without a doubt a big part of it. It happens with everything - things are simply more exciting and intense when you're younger, both in good and bad ways. Things I'd hardly think twice about now would keep me up all night back then - whether that was excitement or fear.
Obviously as you age things will lose their newness and their excitement. You'll start to see the world more for what it actually is than what you dreamed it could be. When I was young I thought only really smart people went to college, I never tried at all in school because I thought it was a joke - just babysitting until something better - but when I got to college it was no different. I realized that even your average lawyer, doctor, or engineer aren't actually very smart. That nobodies job was as exciting, interesting, or challenging as I thought they were. And the only people who break that mold at all tend to be people living lives I'd never want, much too obsessed with work.
That said, I don't think age is everything - I don't think it means a lot of the things I expressed in my comment don't feel true for other reasons. I really did think the internet would be used better than it is now. I thought my younger brother and his friends who grew up with access I always wished I had would far surpass my knowledge of subjects and do awesome things - but it seems most of them just don't really care about "how things work" because it's all so easy now. They think facebook, instagram, etc are the internet. They aren't pushing barriers, they're not redefining the world. Obviously there are still some who try - and maybe there's more now than there was before - but it's not at the scale I'd have dreamed of. It's not that they are any worse than us, it's just that they're not as much better as I'd have hoped.
I don't remember where the saying comes from originally, but it's very true that our greatest minds are working on getting people to click ads. That's sad. It's pathetic really. Our priorities as a society are shit and our society is structured in a way that makes it extremely hard to change. It feels impossible to do anything - which is actually one of the things I'm most interested in trying to address myself, but I've never been able to come up with a solution.
Multiple times a week I sit around doing things like browsing volunteer opportunities, trying to find something worth doing - and every time I fail. Every time I end just a little bit more sad with the state of our society. Every time I have an idea for something that could be great I'm stopped by the million things we've constructed to stop us from doing anything meaningful. Every day I feel a little bit more encouraged to just take my dog and go live in a cabin in the woods, disconnected from this mess we call modern civilization.