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19 May 08

The Big Sort - Bill Bishop w/ Robert G. Cushing - Book Review by Scott Stossel - New York Times

Informative review of Bill Bishop's new book, The Big Sort. It's intriguing to juxtapose this to the Knute Berger article that discusses transumerism, which I also bookmarked today. It's almost as if two things are at work here: on the one hand, people "sorting" themselves demographically, and on the other, people circulating (and becoming a site of circulation), just like capital. The new physics of social data sets, with the transumers being a special case of relative sorting? :)

Also of course fascinating in Stossel's review/ Bishop's book are the observations on "the big sort"'s effect on politics, and that homogenous communities tend to be more cantakerous because they're so bloody convinced that they have it right, whereas heterogenous communities are forced into conversations with people of opposing views, which in turn informs all parties and makes "solutions" less "obvious," but also makes people more willing to compromise and/or put their shoulder to the wheel to keep things rolling in the right direction.

I personally believe that my hometown (Victoria BC) would benefit if more people here had more awareness of all the different things -- vocations, careers, lifestyles, EVERYTHING -- going on, instead of thinking that everyone else surely *must* think just as they do. You see this again and again when the question of urban development comes up: the same tired gang with the same tired cliches runs to the forefront, claims to represent the majority (which in a sense they do, as the majority is just as ignorant as the vocal gang), and bemoans all change coming to the city because they believe it "hurts" what they see as the primary economic engine here (tourism). They're totally unaware, it seems, that the high tech industry overtook tourism several years ago in terms of how much revenue it generates (something like $1.2b for tourism, and nearly $2b for high tech in Greater Victoria). This clinging to homogeneity (which is an illusion here: see the tech and the arts and the "different" communities

www.nytimes.com/...Stossel-t.html - Preview

big_sort demographics democracy trends bill_bishop

Superficially, the phenomenon Bishop is examining is not new, and the litany of division he recites is familiar. The two major political parties have become more extreme and can’t find common ground anymore. National civic groups and mainline church denominations have withered away, replaced by smaller, more narrowly focused independent groups. Marketers (and political pollsters) have sliced up the population into increasingly “microtargeted” segments. The three-network era of mass media, which helped create a national hearth of shared references and values, is long gone, displaced by a new media landscape that has splintered us into thousands of insular tribes. We can no longer even agree on what used to be called facts: Conservatives watch Fox; liberals watch MSNBC. Blogs and RSS feeds now make it easy to produce and inhabit a cultural universe tailored to fit your social values, your musical preferences, your view on every single political issue. We’re bowling alone — or at least only with people who resemble us, and agree with us, in nearly every conceivable way.
This separation into solipsistic blocs would perhaps not be so complete if people of different political views or cultural values at least lived within hailing distance, and encountered one another on the street or in the store from time to time. But, increasingly, they don’t. Over the last decade, as 100 million Americans have moved from one place to another, they’ve clustered in increasingly homogeneous communities. This is where “The Big Sort,” which grew out of a series of articles that Bishop, formerly a reporter at The Austin American-Statesman, wrote with Robert Cushing, a retired sociologist and statistician from the University of Texas, is both wonkiest and most original.
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- “By the turn of the 21st century, it seemed as though the country was separating in every way conceivable.”
- American migration is now inspired at least as much by “lifestyle” choices as by economics. “We have built a country,” Bishop writes, “where everyone can choose the neighbors (and church and news shows) most compatible with his or her lifestyle and beliefs. And we are living with the consequences of this segregation by way of life: pockets of like-minded citizens that have become so ideologically inbred that we don’t know, can’t understand, and can barely conceive of ‘those people’ who live just a few miles away.”
  - Substitute "city" for "country," and you're close to describing Victoria, where ideological inbreeding is in some groups so advanced that its members can't understand "'those people' who live just a few miles away" [i.e., in Vancouver]. Instead, it's all about how "we don't want to be 'just' another Vancouver." That's sorting at work, right here. It's great that Bishop et al. call that into question; here (in Victoria), it's taken as a good thing: that we're "different" from them, etc., but if you look at the whole picture, is it a good thing? Not when it thwarts the city's economy. - on 2008-05-19
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- Bishop argues that this clustering of like with like accelerated in the tumult of the 1960s when, unmoored from the organizations and traditions that had guided their choices about how to live, Americans grew anxious and disoriented — and reflexively sought comfort in the familiar, cocooning themselves in communities of people like themselves. This sorting was compounded in the 1980s and ’90s as the clustering of educated people in certain cities produced regional wage disparities — which in turn attracted more-highly educated people to the richer cities, which in turn accentuated the economic disparities between cities, creating a cycle of division that shows little sign of relenting.
- Does this balkanization matter? Bishop argues convincingly that it does. Psychological studies suggest that the mere fact of division, even when there is no substantive content to it, can be corrosive: in a series of experiments in the 1950s and ’60s, groups of similar people arbitrarily divided into subgroups quickly exploded into conflicts of “Lord of the Flies”-like intensity. Other studies have shown that when relatively like-minded people are grouped together, they don’t settle around the average point of view of the individuals in the group but rather become more extreme in the direction toward which they’re already inclined. This gives clustering a powerful self-reinforcing quality, and helps explain how American counties have hardened into such immovable political clumps. “It doesn’t seem to matter if you’re a frat boy, a French high school student, a petty criminal or a federal appeals court judge,” Bishop writes. “Mixed company moderates; like-minded company polarizes. Heterogeneous communities restrain group excesses; homogeneous communities march toward the extremes.”
- The founding fathers didn’t need social psychology experiments to understand that homogeneity could be dangerous. In their wisdom, they created a system of government that called for constant conversation and compromise among competing interests — what Alexander Hamilton called the “jarring of parties.”

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