I am beginning to find the rate with which technology is advancing more scary than exciting. The ability of the mass media in particular to provide uniform news that is "on-message" is really becoming quite staggering.
Agreed, to an extent, but the technology is a double-edged sword. Yes it enables the mass-media to present news which is 'on-message', but it also enables the media, if they want to, to show images from the front which can sap the public appetite for war. I think possibly Vietnam was the first war where news reports got back home and caused people to say "Hold on - should we be doing this?" I guess if you have a supine Press they'll just reproduce whatever they're fed, whether it comes via 21st century technology or 1940's technology.
The British Press was largely supportive of the war before it started, as were the main opposition parties, but they're now very critical of it, because they've realised that they'd been lied to by Blair. We were taken to war by blood-curdling threats of Weapons of Mass Destruction - horrible chemical and biological weapons which could be deployed within the now-famous 45 minutes. Having over-run Iraq we discovered that they had nothing more mass-destructive than a hand grenade, and the Press and opposition parties realised that they'd been the victims of a con trick.
The Internet, as well, allows the spread of what we might call "subversive" information between people which previously would have been impossible.
It's quite hard to get people to want to go to war - even a just one. Few people would argue that the war against Nazism wasn't just, but it still took Churchill and Roosevelt a long time to get the American public in the right frame of mind to go to war against Germany. They were very close, but then Hitler did the job for them by declaring war on America in the aftermath of Pearl Harbour. (This was probably his second-biggest mistake of the war.)
Chris