Political unification of populations by means of vernacular and 
language groupings was unthinkable before printing turned 
each vernacular into an extensive mass medium. The tribe, an 
extended form of a family of blood relatives, is exploded by 
print, and is replaced by an association of men homogeneously 
trained to be individuals. Nationalism itself came as an intense 
new visual image of group destiny and status, and depended 
on a speed of information movement unknown before printing. 
Today nationalism as an image still depends on the press but 
has all the electric media against it. In business, as in politics, 
the effect of even jet-plane speeds is to render the older 
national groupings of social organization quite unworkable. In 
the Renaissance it was the speed of print and the ensuing 
market and commercial developments that made nationalism 
(which is continuity and competition in homogeneous space) 
as natural as it was new. By the same token, the