Its power of totally involving all people in all other people

I picked up Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy at a used book store the other day. In glancing through it, I find no reason yet to alter my conclusions in a post a year ago, One is bowled over by their originality, i.e. McLuhan was insightful but not systematic.

Emphasis added:

Any technology tends to create a new human environment. Script and papyrus created the social environment we think of in connection with the empires of the ancient world. The stirrup and the wheel created unique environments of enormous scope. Technological environments are not merely passive containers of people but are active processes that reshape people and other technologies alike. In our time the sudden shift from the mechanical technology of the wheel to the technology of electric circuitry represents one of the major shifts of all historical time. Printing from movable types created a quite unexpected new environment—it created the public. Manuscript technology did not have the intensity or power of extension necessary to create publics on a national scale. What we have called “nations” in recent centuries did not, and could not, precede the advent of Gutenberg technology any more than they can survive the advent of electric circuitry with its power of totally involving all people in all other people.

The unique character of the “public” created by the printed word was an intense and visually oriented self-consciousness, both of the individual and the group. The consequences of this intense visual stress with its increasing isolation of the visual faculty from the other senses are presented in this book. Its theme is the extension of the visual modalities of continuity, uniformity, and connectiveness to the organization of time and space alike. Electric circuitry does not support the extension of visual modalities in any degree approaching the visual power of the printed word.

There's the heart of it - "its power of totally involving all people in all other people". We have created an infrastructure of enormous opportunity to all people in virtually all places. In an environment of information abundance, the critical tasks become filtering, connecting and assimilating information into a coherent and productive framework. What enables one person to realize their potential likewise enables another to dissipate their potential in random searches and intellectual dalliances.

There has always been a premium on self-control, goal orientation, diligence, responsibility, etc. In an environment rich in opportunity and distraction, the premium becomes even greater and the likely individual outcomes will become even wider and those on the wrong side of the outcome distribution curve will rail even more about luck and the randomness of fortune.