You are right that there is a growing divisiveness in our society.

The source is not the fact that news channels run 24 hours a day or that the Internet is always on.

If you look at headlines from 50 years ago, you will find newspapers, radio and TV using the same dirty tricks to gain partisan advantage through division. These tricks have been around since antiquity.

For example, the Unity Paradox is well known. The political class identifies an enemy. They then seek power by uniting people against the enemy.

Political leaders might spew forth flowery prose about unity. Partisan speeches about unity usually have the effect of uniting people against each other and creating deeper division. One can find thousands of speeches about unity preceding extremely divisive wars.

But, lets get back to the claim that divisiveness comes from 24 hour news.

It just so happens that the the world is a sphere that revolves and rotates around a sun. It is noon at one point on the planet every moment of the day. It is midnight on the exact opposite of the globe. We split the day into 24 hours just to have a convenient method of measurement.

Now lets look at broadcasting. It takes a lot of money to create a system that broadcasts news. A lot of this investment is in equipment that stays on throughout the day. Imagine a satellite floating in space.

It takes more effort to turn that satellite off and back on to keep in on a 9 to 5 schedule. The very idea of keeping a satellite on a nine to five schedule is absurd when one asks which timezone should be the determining time zone.

HIVE is one twenty four hours a day. There is nothing gained by trying to turn it off.

Complaints that news can be broadcast 24 hours a day is absurd because we are on a spinning sphere that rotates around the sun.

I thought about talking more about the source of the divisiveness in the world today, but the comment is getting too long.

I guess it is enough to point out that around the clock news is not the problem for a species that lives on a sphere. But you are right that the solution comes from people examining their individual beliefs.