Much like an individual person, society at large can be said to have a kind of nervous system, taking in information from a variety of sources, assessing and evaluating it, and passing on what's considered pertinent to the rest of the "body" in whatever form it can best be assimilated.  Ours is malfunctioning in a way that would cause us concern if it occurred in an individual person.

If, in an individual person,  an ever-dwindling portion of the available neural tissue began to account for an ever-increasing share of the "message traffic,"  we would suspect that something was wrong. 

If the messages themselves underwent a significant shift in referentiality, having increasingly less to do with the world outside and more to do with other internally generated material, we would begin to be more concerned--especially if their content were to become overwrought or overdramatic. 

Finally, if such messages reached the point of overwhelming an individual's neural processes, to the point where literal reality was consistently either ignored or misperceived, we would feel compelled to describe the individual as suffering from some form of mental illness.

This is essentially what has happened in the collective nervous system of contemporary society.