If we do affiliate with the people who live around us it is primarily because they share the same values and perspectives as we do—we live with these neighbors in the postmodern life style enclaves I described above. We are escaping from the multiple selves that occupy our Quad One and from the overwhelming challenges of a postmodern world. We settle into an enclave and align our personal identity with this focused enclave. Our identification with a specific enclave is further enhanced by the Internet revolution. We find our enclave on the Internet and may even create a virtual enclave that exists only in Internet space.
There is a second way in which we no longer have time for Quadrant One. We don’t have time to reflect on who we are and what we want to be in our public self. We react to events (external locus of control) and fail to make deliberate choices about what we think of this event and about our relationship with other people who are also associated with this event (internal locus of control). The technologies of our times—especially the technological innovations in contemporary media—have encouraged this perspective and made it a pervasive zeitgeist —a shared perspective and set of assumptions regarding the absence of time and absence of choice about the use of time.
As a result of cable television, Internet searches and talk radio, we live in a world of instance news, condensed analyses, polemical journalism and sound bites. We learn in small units and spend little time reflecting on what we have learned and what biases come along with the bits of information we have acquired. We “know” that we are too busy and believe there is no alternative to being busy. We “know” that we are only getting a small part of the story, when we rely on single source newscasts and newspaper headlines, yet don’t believe we can do anything about this—given that we have “no time for careful review.” Our first quadrant thus becomes a product primarily of external forces and becomes a cluster of multiphrenic sound bites.
