Why is politics ubiquitous in human life?

I will certainly agree that politics do seem to occupy everything we do today. Every time you turn on the TV or read something online, it seems to have a political angle. I remember when I was young, before the Internet became a part of our daily lives, politics took up a significant portion of the newspaper, radio, and television, but it was not all-encompassing. And on television, you basically had the evening news, which...

I will certainly agree that politics do seem to occupy everything we do today. Every time you turn on the TV or read something online, it seems to have a political angle. I remember when I was young, before the Internet became a part of our daily lives, politics took up a significant portion of the newspaper, radio, and television, but it was not all-encompassing. And on television, you basically had the evening news, which was 30 minutes or an hour at most.

That all changed with the creation of CNN in 1980 and the rise of the 24-hour news cycle. But even then, it took several years before politics became everywhere, all of the time. Many actually thought CNN would fail for a lack of interest. But as it gained steam and talk-radio became a growing format, politics took up a larger space. Then with the advent and growth of the Internet, it was all but inevitable that politics would dominate our lives.

There is also the issue of the rise of identity politics. Beginning in the 1960s and the Civil Rights Movement, many other movements including those for women, gays, and American Indians among others also took shape. These focused on political issues affecting a specific identity. There is a broad literature on the role of postmodernism and the influence of social theorists from the Frankfurt School on these movements which largely reconfigured Marxist political theory to fit specific classes of people. Politics became very personalized, less about the whole country or region, and more about how specific policies affected specific groups. 

I think one could argue that the potential for politics becoming ubiquitous in our lives was pretty much there for years. We can envision this as the confluence of political ideologies and technology meeting in a meaningful way. What cable news and the Internet did was give politics a loud voice and platform for achieving that ubiquity.