Truth be told this has been happening for several decades now:<p>"The Age of iPod Politics" (2004)<p><a href="http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,699790,00.html" rel="nofollow">http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,699790,00.h...</a><p>> The great American pacifier is our love of stuff and our ability to fashion our own insular worlds through our staggering selection of things to buy (even if we can't actually afford an SUV). But consumer America is different from political America. In consumer America, diversity of preference is not just tolerated. It is mandatory. [...] You make your choices, and I make mine. Yours, of course, are wrong. But what do I care?<p>> Patching together customized networks of pundits, political comics, online news feeds and talk shows, we can choose among universes in which the polls show a dead heat or a blowout, the National Guard memos are truthful or fraudulent, the economy is rebounding or relapsing. You can watch Fox News and see your surrogate reduce my surrogate to a sputtering fool. I can go to my favorite political sites and follow the blogrolls, link after link, discovering how vast is the universe of people who realize that I am entirely right about everything. This virtual self-gerrymandering promotes black-and-white thinking. [...] You know that my naive ideas will lead America to crumble like Rome, and I know that morons like you are going to get me killed by a dirty bomb, but we never need to actually say a cross word to each other. Or anything at all, for that matter.<p>It's hard to say when it all started, and you could probably say it's been going on in this country since the Federalists vs. Anti-Federalists (or the Tories vs. Patriots, even). But growing up extremely online during the War of Terror, none of this is different to me in <i>kind</i>, only quantity.