Continuity of Personality, Internet and Liturgy

From excerpts of an article by Dietrich von Hildebrand, at New Liturgical Movement  -- three types of men or ways to live.

I'm quoting it because it also seems to epitomize three different approaches to the internet, especially to the news cycle.   The first one seems like the default.

If a man lived only in separate moments, without any link between them, if he did not know himself as the same being in the past and present, if all that he experienced and accomplished and all that was revealed to him sank back into nothingness before the actual contact with the new "now," he would be only a bundle of disconnected experiences. He would be deprived of the dimension of depth... There are unconscious men, always completely absorbed in the present moment. What has happened to them in the past, what moved and filled them, fades away as soon as a new, strong impression takes possession of them. They are capable of feeling these strong impressions, but these are not rooted in them, they do not become their unalterable possession and a background against which new impressions are juxtaposed without order and selection. The present always dominates the past, even when the content of the present is far more insignificant and mediocre. These people glide through life without developing from their contact with values and their experience of joys and sorrows. When their attention is drawn to their defects, they admit them for the moment, but in the next moment everything is engulfed again. Such men naturally are not really awake, in spite of the force and vivacity of their impressions... These men are dominated mostly by "fashion"; what is "in the air" at the present moment in their narrower and larger surroundings conquers them easily. 

Now for the second type.   Here I start thinking also of the parable of the seeds and the sower;  the first type is like the seed scattered on shallow ground, the second is the seed scattered on rocky ground. 

 Beside this type of extreme discontinuity we find another type of man who is accessible to deep experiences, whom the truths and values already acquired have become a durable possession, but who does not resist the onrush of intense new impressions; the inner content accumulated in the past does serve as a measure for these new impressions. These are the people who do not let what they possess in the depth of their souls become the principle of formation for the present situation... The power of the present and the freshness and power of new, unusual experiences exercise too great an influence upon them... 

The third type is the ideal, it seems -- people who can integrate the new with the old.   Here is  Hildebrand's description:

 The man with a spirit of continuity, on the contrary, maintains super-actually all truths and values. He observes fully the response-to-value attitude; he possesses a complete understanding of the realm of values and their demands; he fully penetrates them. Thus the values he has grasped and maintained become the natural background against which all new impressions stand out; not only do they arise against the background, but also their compatibility with it must be proved. The enchantment and glamor of novelty has as little hold on the man with a sense of continuity as has routine. The familiar and customary cease to influence him as soon as they are discovered to be valueless. The new, the freshly experienced, will not exercise attraction for him whenever it is acknowledged to be without value...

It looks like the excerpts are from a chapter on Continuity of the Liturgy, in the book Liturgy and Personality, which I have not read.      This sounds like a very Hildebrandian type of book, combining philosophy and psychology and theology.     An excerpt from the book jacket:

The principal point of the book you are about to read is that the liturgy of the Church decisively shapes a healthy personality. Hildebrand insists throughout the text that the primary purpose of the liturgy is not to form the personality but to give proper praise to God, the supreme value. Nevertheless, precisely by ordering human beings so thoroughly to God, the liturgy does in fact, as a derivative effect, contribute to their flourishing.

Of continuity in the liturgy, he goes on to note that the regular participation in the Mass and the Hours and over time, the liturgical year,  can stabilize the personality, give it the continuity it might otherwise lack.     The way he expresses this is quite in tune with the monastic culture:

Thus the liturgy itself is a great actualization of continuity, a participation in the adoring love of the Son for His heavenly Father, which always remains the same. The man who lives in the liturgy organically acquires the spirit of continuity; his relationships with all true values which speak to us of God's glory also are continuous; likewise his relationships with other men, the community, knowledge, the world of beauty, nature, and art.