First came a process of consolidation, in which the number of "neural cells" through which information is received, evaluated, and passed on to the rest of the society's "body" diminished steeply.  As the comunications industry underwent mergers and re-mergers and consolidations in the same manner as virtually every other form of business today, the  number of newspapers and magazines and other communications outlets has plummeted. 

The function of determining what the news means became even more concentrated.  Newspapers that once prided themselves on their squads of first-rate local columnists have been reduced to carrying pretty much the same small set of Name Brand Pundits as everyone else. 

Regarding what was transmitted through the dwindling number of communication "cells," an ever-increasing self-referentiality became the sine qua non of the contemporary media.   A major media story would spin off sub-stories about the people close to it, the people covering it, even the story of how the  story was covered.   

The overwrought, fevered, and outright lurid nature of the material could also scarcely be escaped.

Then things got dramatically worse.  With the rise of the Internet, a dwindling number of professional and ,more or less responsible information outlets began to be shoved aside by a burgeoning profusion of online sources that were less constrained by traditional journalistic scruples in their quest for clicks and eyeballs.  These new outlets zeroed in on subsets of the population holding certain sets of beliefs, and wooed them by telling them nothing but stories that supported what they allreafy believed--sometimes half-truths, sometimes twisted facts, and with disturbing frequency, pure inventions, ranging from minor fibs to giant whoppers.  When people latched onto these sources of content, they began to tune out everything else.

The rise of wild-eyed partisan blogs and quasi-news has not been solely responsible for putting our reportage out of touch with literal reality, however.  The pre-Internet media already had significant problems in this regard.  As far back as 1996, James Fallows provided excellent documentation and analysis of what was wrong with our traditional news media in Breaking the News:  How the Media Undermine American Democracy.   Then in 1998, Neal Gabler's Life, the Movie:  How Entertainment Conquered Reality offered a perceptive look at the growing primacy of telling entertaining stories not only in our media, but also in our politics and on into the superstructure of social power.

What will be shown in the forthcoming pages is that the problem goes deeper than Fallows and Gabler have described.  Dissociation in contemporary society is not just a problem of politicians or the communications industry.  It is inherent in virtually every aspect of our lives, ingrained in even the ostensibly rational processes of business, and permeating even the most ordinary of our conversations with one another.

Although the primary forces behind this transformation tend to be commercial, its effects on us are personal and profound.