Quote Originally Posted by Steve Blair View Post
I'm not 100% sure that this is anything really new (look back at some of the debate surrounding the Mexican War and Spanish/American War for starters), but I agree that what has accelerated the trend is the stunning access to multiple, real-time (or almost real time) media sources. Hearst never held office, but his impact on American politics and policy is pretty much beyond debate. Punditry has been around for ages, but the media has accelerated the process and then (IMO) super-charged it by an addiction to polls and soundbites in place of real stories. When views are presented as being held by "most Americans" (when in fact it's a poll sample of the same 1000 people in the greater NYC area), many people start thinking that if their neighbors think that way, then maybe they're holding the wrong opinion. It's all exaggerated by a political process that really only engages enough of the fringe to win an election and isn't honestly interested in engaging the majority in any sort of discussion (too many memories of the Silent Majority, perhaps?).

Agree that there's nothing completely new. What I'm suggesting is that information and technology saturation has led more people to look to pundits rather than elected leaders for political cues. It has also diminished the role that expertise and experience play as filters of political ideas. In the old days, people who were uninformed or unthoughtful seldom earned an audience. Now any moron can call Rush Limbaugh and get air time. This leads other idiots to think their position can't be all that wrong since Bubba just expressed it on national radio. (And the same thing happens on Air America). By the same token (and as you suggest), information technology reinforces extremism because it allows the extremist to link with others like him or her.

I've had to deal with that myself. A study I did in 1994 struck a nerve with the paranoid schizophrenic the-goverment-is-doing-mind-control subculture. While in the old days, people like this just lived in a run down shack in the woods and everyone stayed away from them, now they find like minded people on the Internet and it convinces them that maybe they are NOT crazy. I literally had a voice mail from one of them last Friday screaming at me for contributing to the destruction of the human race. (Normally I only hear THAT from my teenage daughters). When this started after the release of the study it literally shook me enough that I obtained a permit to carry a concealed handgun (and seldom am more than a few feet from my Glock except when I'm in the office).