The United States is history. Or will be very shortly. It’s economic and military muscle might not atrophy but its constituent parts, namely its constituents, will disassemble.

If you know anything of Western Europe, you’ll know it’s long been dogged by the nationalistic tendencies of ever-decreasing communities – from ETA to Plaid Cymru. And the sum of what used to be the Eastern bloc is being reduced to tinier and tinier parts.

But America won’t fragment into nationalities - most people here came to escape that - it will fragment into nations of interests. The irony is that this is being fueled by the very network that was created to unite us.

The web was supposed to bring about greater understanding and connectivity – a place where we can all hold digital hands and sing an almighty Kumbaya. Actually, more and more, the web, like a good Playtex bra, divides and separates.

This blog for instance will only ever reach a few hundred people who either know me, or have an interest in small obscure ad agencies, or people with absolutely too much time on their hands.

And if you travel down the long tail of commerce you find 12 people listening to the Groundhogs. Those 12 people would never have found each other through any other medium and a minority interest is rekindled, legitimized and glorified. All well and good. Except a shared interest is not common ground if it is populated by so few.

We don’t need to be reminded of the days of mass audiences and water cooler chatter to realize we are all on different paths these days. Even when our paths do cross, a conversation about a web site or a youtube clip is cut short when the colleague you’re talking to says “oh I saw that months ago”.

All technology dehumanizes us because, by its very nature, it allows us to transact without human interaction. A second life is no life.

Nor, increasingly, does the web allow a proliferation of thought. The idea of filters and bots is to reduce the amount of information we see. And we happily limit it to our own set of pre-conceived notions and check-box philosophies. Sometimes it’s not even our choice. Google is happy to limit access to China’s citizens to gain access to her market.

The internet extends our reach but reinforces our prejudices. Before, if we were challenged by the people in our community we might have to redress and rethink to remain part of it. Now we simply go online and find a group of people who agree with us.

No-one changes their mind anymore. John Stewart preaches to the already converted. Fox News is for right-wing republicans and always will be.

In this world there are no enemies, only buddy lists. But a world without enemies is a colorless one.

One only has to recall Orson Welles speech in The Third Man to realize that the death of intellectual and emotional confrontation is the death of imagination.

‘In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

By socializing in smaller and smaller circles of consensus we are diminished. And it’s not just the media that becomes fragmented but society itself.

Eventually, there is only one i in iNation.

gb 10/24/06