Moreover, the nature of the communication has also changed a great deal. At the beginning of the last century, most people were largely ignorant of events in the world and had little access to ideas and especially to critical ideas. As a result of being plugged in to the mass media in greater numbers, they increasingly became more likely aware of, and have an impression of, many more things than ever before. to be Similar to other industrial societies, the United States quickly moved from what Marx called "rural idiocy" to electronically mediated urban cosmopolitanism. Mass communication and transportation were expanding people's worlds in ways that had never occurred before human history, in effect, compressing time and space. They were drawing things such as Casablanca, Morocco, and Imperial Japan into the common consciousness, and as December7, 1941 in Pearl Harbor suggests, drawing them into tangible, violence-filled relationships as well.