Palm Beach Post writer and a House Divided...

Randy Schultz, a writer for the Palm Beach Post, wrote about the current political climate fraught with Red state and Blue state viewpoints, a electronic sectarianism defining our present situation. He makes a great case for the increased tribalism in Washington where tribal divisions prevent progress on just about any issue.

The societal transformation stems from a profound switch in media-- the changeover from print media to electronic media. We expect our electronic media to do what the electronic media once did-- organize thoughts expressed by a public comprised of individual viewpoints. The new media environment comes simultaneously, explained Marshall McLuhan, not in an orderly, visual fashion like the print media of old. The new media environment is auditory and full of emotion with no clear boundaries. Auditory information, like music, arrives without boundaries. It is not like the orderly progression of words across the page. Auditory information arrives constantly from all directions and changes constantly.

"Ours is a brand-new world of allaonceness. 'Time' has ceased, 'space' has vanished. We now live in a global village... a simultaneous happening.

"At high speeds of electric communication, purely visual means of apprehending the world are no longer possible; they are just too slow to be relevant or effective.

"Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously. As soon as information is acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer information. Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition."

* from The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore (p.63)

Schultz comments that the different tribes, conservatives and liberals, stand in isolation from each other. Ideologically we may be very divided but, as McLuhan explains, we are profoundly involved with one another and there-in lies the rub-- we rub up against each other endlessly!