“Electric speed in bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree. It is this implo-sive factor that alters the position of the Negro, the teen-ager, and some other groups. They can no longer be contained, in the political sense of limited association. They are now involved in our lives, as we in theirs, thanks to the electric media.”

-p5

While this is no doubt a commentary upon both the the civil rights and student activists movements that were happening around the time of the publication of UM, these ring particularly true in our current moment. In the 60’s this meant the use of widely available hand held camera footage as disseminated through national media outlets. In the 2010s this meant ubiquitous cell phone footage as disseminated through the internet(and then subsequently without fail through national media outlets) As I’ve written elsewhere in this piece on the rise of Trumpism:

Just like 40 years prior, new technology — cell phone cameras, and the internet — gave citizens more access to intolerable images of human tragedy. That same technology offered them images of confrontation and destruction. These images permeated the entire media environment, and scandalized a largely older, largely white, and largely rural and suburban voting public, and in the next presidential election in 2016 a “law and order” candidate emerged victorious. In those intervening years, the mass media had become far more sensational, pervasive, conservative, addictive, powerful and unmoored from the facts. Trump simply met that media on it’s own terms.  

That is, TV shifted the power dynamic, and the internet is again shifting that dynamic, and each has had their backlash or reversal.