This is hardly a phenomenon that is limited to the arbitrary boundaries of the US. This "sensitivity" in my estimation is due to the new found interconnectedness of consciousness via the internet. As Marshall McLuhan wrote many decades ago:
"The human family now exists under conditions of a global village. We live in a single constricted space resonant with tribal drums."
"The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations."
Go look at YouTube comments and you'll see what he meant. Never before has the world, with all its highly variable levels of intelligence, ignorance, and ideologies, been thrust into a "room" together and "forced" to listen to other opinions like it has with the internet.
"In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner."
"The human family now exists under conditions of a global village. We live in a single constricted space resonant with tribal drums."
"The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations."
Go look at YouTube comments and you'll see what he meant. Never before has the world, with all its highly variable levels of intelligence, ignorance, and ideologies, been thrust into a "room" together and "forced" to listen to other opinions like it has with the internet.
"In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner."