The State of The Unity

 I will try to be brief even though these are subjects upon which I love to bloviate.

I read Marshall McLuhan's "The Medium is the Message" decades ago and I have reflected on the author's ideas many, many times. 

Now. let's jump over to The Ages of The Internet.

1. Pioneering Days: A devout Catholic friend of mine spent a small fortune downloading encyclicals. The Catholic site was in Baltimore and using dialup--the only available option--he was subject to long-distance charges (remember those?) Being that even text documents could take hours to download and there were frequent interruptions, my friend paid top dollar for his cyber adventure.

2. The Usenet Era. When I first got on the Internet I spent almost all of my time visiting newsgroups. I later wandered into chat rooms but mostly I jumped from sites that focused on jokes and sports and entertainment.

3. The Website Era. Lots to be said about this timeframe but I am keeping it brief. Germaine to this conversation, newsgroups gave way to websites.

4. The Blog Era. I created three websites prior to launching this pre-formatted blog and it was a lot of work. Not hard work but incredibly time-consuming. Blogs were liberating. 

5. The Social Media Era: Epochs and eras and millennia and life cycles play themselves out in accelerated fashion. Social media are not dead but their golden age is over.

6. The Tower of Babel Era: As in Scripture, an all-powerful entity has deliberately created confusion and we scramble to learn new ways of communication. We are just getting started in this era and I have no idea where we are headed.

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What's this got to do with anything? 

Good question. "The medium is the message" is a cliche that overstates the communication. But it is a damn good cliche. The preacher might expound on the same principles in the tent, on radio, on cable, or on Facebook but more than style changes along the way. Some topics play better in some media and other topics play better elsewhere. As well, the audience changes--demographically as well as to the degree of involvement and interest-- with each change of medium. Sly preachers take these things into account.

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Briefly and succinctly: The tribal nature of politics follows similar but not parallel trends. Old school Conservatism predated the Internet and a lot of the dinosaurs did not digitally evolve all that much. But informal networks formed in three Internet Eras:

1. The Website Era.

2. The Blog Era.

3. The Social Media Era.

The dinosaurs of the Website Era feature a few sellouts and traitors. Drudge, Twitchy, TownHall, National Review Online. But even here, there are many voices who cannot and will not deny that this election was stolen.

The Blog Era informal network. I was a little bit worried about them two weeks ago. I am referring to this guy's blogroll. Main Street, if you will. I can say that the opinion on Main Street is damn near-unanimous: Our Election was stolen!

Social Media Refugees: They are much more radical and outspoken than either of the two prior-referenced groups. Though they struggle to be heard after being silenced, Planet Deplatform is unanimously holding the opinion that the 2020 election was stolen.

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In summary, Zuckerberg and Dorsey and Soros and anyone who has an agent have worked hard not just to deceive us, but to demoralize us and to create discord amongst us. To those ends, the ruling class has failed. 

We are unified as never before!