Before the advent of radio, TV and newspapers and magazines with national distribution, most opinion was local, and those with a broader view of the world shared a similar education based on a relatively small set of classical texts. The first great wave of modern media combined with compulsory education to create a larger national, mostly middle-class public. Widely shared educational standards and media with limited bandwidth restricted the range of public discourse and enabled the creation of the mass public on which advertisers and governments both depended. With the Internet’s introduction of virtually infinite bandwidth and easy ways to hook up with likeminded individuals, we are seeing a proliferation of virtual publics, most of whose members imagine that everyone must think and feel the way they do, since they rarely encounter exceptions.

Before the advent of radio, TV and newspapers and magazines with national distribution, most opinion was local, and those with a broader view of the world shared a similar education based on a relatively small set of classical texts. The first great wave of modern media combined with compulsory education to create a larger national, mostly middle-class public. Widely shared educational standards and media with limited bandwidth restricted the range of public discourse and enabled the creation of the mass public on which advertisers and governments both depended. With the Internet’s introduction of virtually infinite bandwidth and easy ways to hook up with likeminded individuals, we are seeing a proliferation of virtual publics, most of whose members imagine that everyone must think and feel the way they do, since they never encounter exceptions.