It is what enables us to talk to one another with some confidence of being not only heard but, as Isaiah Berlin would have it, being understood. It is what enables Canadians to live together with sufficient levels of trust and security and to conduct their democracy more or less under the rubric of having a common purpose and serving the common good.

It is that facility which is in danger of unravelling – without, it should be noted, any rescue being offered by polling, the shotgun substitute for public consultation that politicians and governments have so heavily relied upon.

Polling methodology is breaking up on the rocks. People's increased unwillingness to respond to surveys is making it harder to assemble demographically representative samples and thus meaningful results.

Public cleavage is contributing to polls' debased value as an expression of public will: What public, or how many publics, are we talking about?

And the erosion of shared knowledge is undermining polls – not to mention social cohesion: that fundamental element of Benedict Anderson's imagined community, the information and knowledge that enable citizens to engage in debates and have opinions about what they should be doing together as a society, whether it is university education, health care or garbage pickup.

The central instruments of social cohesion have been the mass media, now being gnawed away at by specialty channels and the Internet, and by new generations who do not feel affiliated (the word communications theorists use) with TV networks or CBC radio or newspapers.

And what appears to be the greatest single impact of digital media is the disappearance of what political scientists call the public space – the very public space that, two centuries ago, newspapers created in Canada.

Prof. Gene Allen of Ryerson University's school of journalism cautions against assuming that mass media created some monolithic national consciousness in the past. “The fact you give someone a message,” he points out, “really doesn't tell you what they're going to do about it.”

Rather, he says, the significance of shared knowledge and its importance to social cohesion is more complex.

Shared knowledge means that equally important to what is said on the nightly newscasts, or what newspapers say, is that so many Canadians can assume that so many other Canadians are watching the same newscasts or reading the same newspapers.

As the U.S. media sociologist James Carey once said, reading a newspaper is like attending mass.

NEW GLUE

With network ratings and circulations falling farther and farther behind population growth, there remains, says Prof. Allen, “a strong desire among people to know what is socially known … [but] the cohesive core of common information is shrinking.”

The nature of the glue being provided by the new social networking instruments like Facebook and Twitter at this stage isn't known, he says. What may be immediately at peril is the mass-media serendipity of being intellectually challenged and engaged.

Valpy also quotes Carleton j-prof Christopher Dornan as saying newspapers forced one to look at views one didn't necessarily agree with. For those who obtain news primarily through the Internet, they tend to seek out news perspectives they already agree with, Dornan said.

“Society is always better when someone is trying to undermine your views. And particularly, social cohesion is better, because being challenged forces you to think through why you believe what you believe. It's the stimulus for debate and discussion and a recognition of multiple others.”

Unfortunately, I think Dornan is talking about newspapers at their theoretical best.

I'm going from 30-year-old memories, but I don't recall the Edmonton Journal running a lot of pro-National Energy Program op-ed pieces -- and no editorials (can't remember how the Toronto Star treated the story. That paper wasn't widely available in Edmonton in 1979-80).

There was a distinct divide between small-C conservative Alberta, a Progressive Conservative bastion federally and provincially in those days (which hasn't changed), and the national Liberal government that had virtually all of its support east of Kenora, Ont. (I believe the Liberals swept Quebec in the 1980 federal election, taking 75 seats).

But you could say there was significant social cohesion within Alberta in terms of values, myths and worldview.

It's worth noting that the sense of grievance only deepened in Alberta, leading to the creation of the Reform Party in 1987 (a partial reaction to then-Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney's constitutional adventurism that was seen to be favouring Quebec, but also because the West still didn't see itself as having enough power).

When the Meech Lake Accord failed on June 23, 1990, the formation of the Bloc Quebecois was one response (Gilles Duceppe would win election in Montreal later that summer). The Bloc affects Canadian politics to this day, making a majority government almost impossible to form.

The various levels of government took one more stab at constitutional reform with the Charlottetown Accord. One part of that process was the Citizen's Forum on Canada's Future (aka the Spicer Commission) led by former languages commissioner Keith Spicer. Released in June 1991 (about the time of a nasty recession), the phrase I still remember is "There is a fury in the land."

Well, I suppose people can congeal around fury as a shared value.

The Charlottetown Accord went down to defeat in a referendum on Oct. 26, 1992.

In the 1993 federal election, the Progressive Conservative party got destroyed, falling to two seats. The Reform Party came to dominate in the West and Bloc Quebecois in Quebec. In 1995, the Quebec sovereigntists would come within about 50,000 votes of winning a referendum.

I would idly note that all of this occurred prior to the emergence of the Intertubes as a disruptive communications medium -- and when newspapers and local TV had much greater market share than they do now.

The Canadian median age in 1967 was 26, when Pierre Trudeau was getting ready to lead the country. It is now 43. Thus, not surprisingly, for the first time since Ekos began asking Canadians 15 years ago how they self-identify, a slightly larger number label themselves small-c conservative rather than small-l liberal, reinforcing policy indicators such as declining support for pacifism and a single-payer public health-care system.

The boomers eventually will totter off stage, but the people behind them are cleaved into two significant age-related groups, what Ekos president Frank Graves calls “open cosmopolitans” and “continental conservatives.”

The open cosmopolitans, with an over-representation of Generation X, are extremely receptive to diversity, immigration and the outside world and hold generally progressive views on issues such as foreign policy. The continental conservatives, with an overrepresentation from Generation Y (the under-30s), are comfortable with current government directions and see Canada being more closely drawn into a North American partnership.

There is no identifiable successor group on the radar screen to the vanishing supporters of Pearson-Trudeau progressive statism, in case anyone was hoping.

Maybe demographics is driving a different type of cohesion, just as it did 40 years ago, and we are in transition. And maybe that is an even greater factor than changes in the media in driving any perceived breakdown in cohesion that we are currently witnessing.

Maybe our provincial politics are too parochial, along with our newspapers -- perhaps an unavoidable side effect that comes with being the second-largest country, by land mass, in the world. Earlier this summer, I remember hearing B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell  talk about a partnership between Canada and British Columbia in a way that had me wondering on Twitter when B.C. had declared sovereignty.

Still, we don't seem as crazy as our American friends do this summer in that country's health reform debate.

John Ibbitson, the Globe's Washington columnist (but who will be returning to head the Ottawa bureau), wrote this on Aug. 27:

Canadians seek to avoid big political fights. Americans revel in them.

Stephen Harper and Michael Ignatieff agree about everything that matters. Their approaches to health care, education, equalization and other social policies are identical. They concur on the fundamental assumptions about employment insurance, although we may wage an election on the details. Canadian foreign policy, to the extent we have any, is largely bipartisan.

America is a culture of profound divisions: between the majority who treasure their right to bear arms and the minority who abhor gun violence; between those who want less government and those who want more; between North and South and Southwest and Great Plains and Pacific Coast; between older and younger and richer and poorer and black and white and Latino and Asian.

America is an argument that never ends.

The differences between the two political cultures – ours of accommodation, theirs of confrontation – contribute to the anti-American streak that infects too many Canadians. We are polite, consensual, communal, caring, goes the stereotype; they are loud, rude, violent, rabidly individualistic.

This is not only false; it misses a crucial distinction between the two societies. Americans yell at each other in full confidence that their country is the finest place on Earth and that it will always endure. Canadians keep their voices down for fear an honest argument would wreck the country.

Ibbitson said Canada has never really congealed as a true nation, which has provided both strengths and weaknesses. And he offered this closing thought:

Put it this way: How confident are you that, 100 years from now, the United States will still be here? How confident are you that Canada will still be here?

Exactly.