The word "paradigm" is often overused and, at times, overwrought. It seems that Thomas Kuhn, who launched a thousand ships with his "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (1962) wasn't pleased with the expanded use of the word and, indeed, some reading his book counted 42 different "meanings" in that text alone. Apparently paradigm is fraught with misunderstandings. So why do we use it?
We use the term as a way of describing "forms" – itself an often misused term – and, in particular, clusters of social and cultural forms that have been formally caused by communication technologies. Causality has been replaced by "correlation" in many statistics-based efforts and, in the wider historic view, has been under attack for a long time. "Formal Causality" was arguably discarded in many circles as early as the 17th-century. This was likely in part because it was the cornerstone of Aristotle's famous Four Causes, which persisted in most dialogue until Print displaced the earlier Scribal paradigm.
We use the term "paradigm" as a way of describing "forms," and, in particular, clusters of social/cultural forms that have been "formally caused" by communication technologies.
Aristotle's definitions of these causes have been translated in many ways. The original Greek he used specified the term "paradigma" to distinguish Formal Cause from the others and, as best we can tell, the English translations avoid "paradigm" in favor of "exemplar" &c. While other words like "epoch" and "era" and "age" might be more common to describe what we mean, we still prefer paradigm – particularly when it is used to connote the "forms" which are involved.