By now we've all heard of the protesters shouted racial and sexual epithets at some House Democrats as they made their way to hear President Obama speak to his party this weekend to encourage them to pass the healthcare reform bill. Emanuel Cleaver was apparently spat on, Barney Frank was called a faggot, and John Lewis was called the N-word. And on Wednesday, CBS released some of the messages left for Bart Stupak, calling him, among other things, "a baby-killing motherfucker" for his decision to support the healthcare bill that President Obama signed into law on Monday. At least 10 members of Congress have received death threats.

I hardly find this surprising. Not because I'm a liberal, and not because I feel that these people are the crazy fringe elements of the world looking for a place to vent. And not because we saw it last summer at the town hall meetings. I'm not surprised because our tactile, physical world has become like the internet, and this kind of thing is normal there (here).

In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan explains that, "The 'message' of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs." It's the thought process behind his famous assertion that "the medium is the message". In other words, McLuhan said, something like the railway (the medium, or "extension of ourselves") didn't introduce humans to the idea of transportation, but rather altered human perceptions and functions as they related to distance, leisure, and work.

What's been clearly emerging for some time as part of the message of the internet is a change in our relationships. And it is there that the internet performs a sort of weird de-evolution from the resulting messages of preceding media, in that other forms of technology have eventually allowed humans to understand one another. Of all the changes in pattern that the television introduced, perhaps its most crucial was the elimination of the unfamiliar.

But one facet of the internet's message is that of a re-emerging tribalism. Even a "social" network like Facebook is designed to be exclusive. Everyone's there, and yet nobody is. When one examines the traits of online forums or comment threads, there is even more fracturing of opinion; opinion, one can't help but note, that is accepted as valid by virtue of it being there. It's a symptom of the nature of the online world – one that is endlessly self-selective, tending more toward the validation of one's own perceptions, rather than consideration of conflicting information.

Obviously, the internet did not cause people to be rude, or to hurl epithets; this is not the first time someone's been called the N-word in public. What the internet has done is present communal ideas in a way that we've rarely, if ever, seen. When everything arrives at once, context is lost, with any and all information being regarded on a level field. That lack of hierarchical information lends unintentional weight to everything, equally.

While the message of every medium that has preceded the internet has altered human perception, never has a medium presented all previous content simultaneously, electronically, at the speed of light. And as McLuhan noted during a speech to the Empire Club of Canada in 1972, "At electric speeds, nobody makes decisions but everybody becomes participant in a complex situation for which he can take no responsibility whatever."

So, back to the demonstrators shouting at House Democrats as they walked to hear the president speak. There's no particular way to account for how that kind of vulgarity became commonplace online, because since we all made the decision to accept it at the same time, nobody did.

However, it might be easier to see how the language of the internet and relationships of the online world have begun to alter human functions. Older technological media such as television or radio have become more like the internet – not only more fractured, but increasingly interactive and opinion-based. It's made online expression more legitimate, and encouraged the perception that as on the web, social barriers in the physical world (that is, not online) are similarly limited or nonexistent. The fact that abusive epithets are being expressed in public isn't new, but the pattern might be; they are part of a new message.

But this aspect of the internet's message should not surprise us. After all, as McLuhan said during his last television appearance, "The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations."