By nature, we are a basically tribal species-- and not designed for particularly large tribes, either. That the human brain can only care for about 150 people at a time has been understood for a while, and now it turns out that even Facebook can't expand that number.
This should come as a surprise to absolutely no one, considering the sort of limited success we've had as a society trying to convince ourselves to care about people starving overseas / in another state / downtown.
At base, it seems human beings are best-designed to live in small-ish, tight-knit groups. One of the largest challenges of civilization has been to try and extend our loyalty beyond our immediate circle of 150 friends. One of the first stages of a typical American education is to soak our children's brains-- positively saturate them-- in a shared American identity.
It doesn't always take. We have "retribalized" entities splitting off all the time, and now it seems we are in the process of tribalizing our whole political system.
Considering some of the ways in which human beings can act towards fellow humans who are not "of us," this is a potentially serious problem. Unfortunately, fracturing into tribal entities comes naturally to us, whereas bodies as large and diverse as nation-states do not, so much.
The late Marshall McLuhan made something of a career out of charting the forces that bring us together and tear us apart. Indeed, his phrase, "the medium is the message," refers to the psychological effects, the underlying "message," inherent to various forms of media. The written word (at least when using an alphabet, rather than pictograms) creates meaning-- lasting, durable meaning-- out of individually-meaningless units: letters. Reasoned arguments are assembled in this way using letters and words like the interlocking cogs of a Swiss watch, and when the medium becomes available to a wider audience through the use of the printing press, the written word soon ceases to be a tool only of the elite. It's a herald of rationality and, perhaps a little less kindly, rationalism.
Contrast this to the television, in which words flow by in an "oral" stream: ephemeral, impressionistic, emotionally effective (and affective), but difficult to pin down, hold still, and analyze. This makes it an absolutely gorgeous marketing tool. It does have its limits, of course. The recent Bush administration was absolutely masterful at using television (WMD's in Iraq, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and on and on), but found Hurricane Katrina too much to keep control of.
And then, of course, we have the internet: text-based, yet kaleidoscopic, uniting us as a single globe, yet so easily dividing us into rabid packs of (for example) feral PS3 worshippers and XBox cultists.
... Of course, it's possible to belong to more than one "tribe," and the internet doesn't place geographical limitations on where its tribes come from, which may make open warfare between at least some forms of internet partisan difficult.
Would that our political divisions in the U.S. were as geographically diverse: when tribe A views tribe B as evil, and tribe B sees tribe A as insane, living in separate enclaves seems like a good way to make the situation worse.
... I say as a liberal living happily in Seattle. Ah, well.
Yes, and if we don't have a tribe--a face-to-face thick relational group, we miss it deeply. Research also puts relationships at about the top of the list of what makes us happy. Church congregations are a nice tribal size, as are Tea Parties and Neighborhood Pubs. No one is quite sure where Facebook fits in this psychic net, but there's a lot of speculation--though I have not seen any by folks for whom it actually is the main relational medium.
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