Rapid-Onset Political Enlightenment – Tablet Magazine
Something big changed sometime after the year 2000 in the way we communicated with each other, and the means by which we absorbed new information and formed a working picture of the world around us. What changed can be understood as the effect of the ongoing transition from the world of 20th-century media to our current digital landscape. This once-every-five-centuries revolution would have large effects, ones we have only just begun to assimilate, and which have largely rendered the assumptions and accompanying social forms of the past century obsolete, even as tens of millions of people, including many who imagine themselves to reside near the top of the country s social and intellectual pyramids, continue to imagine themselves to be living in one version or another of the long 20th century that began with the advent of a different set of mass communications technologies, which included the telegraph, radio, and film.
The time was ripe, in other words, for a cultural revolution which would, according to the established patterns of American history, in turn generate a political one.
David Samuels.
This article is getting a lot of attention on X. See if you like it. Seems more like a summary of events than any new insights, but YMMV.