Comments on: The world is small. Except when it isn’t.

By: Eric

Eric — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 14:32:39 +0000

Spackle, great points all. Even though I met new people in New York, fundamentally I was still living in the same “cosmopolite” culture – not like living in Africa or another culture entirely.

While I agree that some of our choices are restricted by outside influences like planning, I think it’s possible to shake things up a little bit. I wasn’t thinking at as macro a level as you are, I think – I was thinking of the quotidian choices we make about whether to hang out with the friends we already know or to check out the new party or experience that we’ve been invited to. But I’d love to have a conversation about the broader perspective you suggest here.

Bats, thanks for that quote – another friend of mine mentioned that Bell Curve statistic recently, and I’d been mangling it. Richard Florida calls this phenomenon “The Big Sort”, as we self-select ourselves into communities where we are all alike. We are choosing to avoid conflict and live in our small worlds. I’m not really one to talk, mind you, living in a wealthy suburb and surrounding myself with people much like myself.

Another interesting point is that physical location is becoming both less and more important. It’s becoming less important in that I can have closer relationships with people across the country than I do with my next door neighbor. But it’s becoming more important in that I can choose my location to surround myself with “my people”. Both of these tendencies are weakening the potential of serendipity, of me experiencing something new or new people because I happen to run into somebody or walk by something that I didn’t plan to.

Thanks again for the comments – interesting stuff.

By: Bats

Bats — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 13:05:27 +0000

I think I’ve mentioned this quote in the past, but I thought I’d post it with some relevance–from an Atlantic Monthly column by David Brooks back in 2003:

Americans tend more and more often to marry people with education levels similar to their own, and to befriend people with backgrounds similar to their own.

My favorite illustration of this latter pattern comes from the first, noncontroversial chapter of The Bell Curve. Think of your twelve closest friends, Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray write. If you had chosen them randomly from the American population, the odds that half of your twelve closest friends would be college graduates would be six in a thousand. The odds that half of the twelve would have advanced degrees would be less than one in a million. Have any of your twelve closest friends graduated from Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, Caltech, MIT, Duke, Dartmouth, Cornell, Columbia, Chicago, or Brown? If you chose your friends randomly from the American population, the odds against your having four or more friends from those schools would be more than a billion to one.

Many of us live in absurdly unlikely groupings, because we have organized our lives that way.

I thought that the calculations of odds was pretty interesting.

By: Spackle

Spackle — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 08:34:18 +0000

Be wary of equating travel or New York with “large world” living. As Michael likes to say, New York displays a cosmopolitan provincialism. That tends to suggest the world has come to New York, so one doesn’t need to look much outside the city–or often, outside Manhattan. Possibly Manhattan and certain Brooklyn neighborhoods. There is much in Manhattan, but plenty is not.

Similarly–at least to judge by Michael’s experience, and a lesser extent mine–it’s possible to travel the world and yet remain in the company of a class of cosmopolites, many of whom know each other as you describe. Put another way, in some respects it’s harder than it used to be to get somewhere else–or, when you travel, you may encounter a larger version of your existing world, but that’s not the same as living in or encountering the larger world more generally.

***

Do we choose the mix of worlds we live in? This question is complex in that it gets into broader questions of agency, independent thought (or lack thereof), the influence of one’s surroundings, and the question of whether/the degree to which we can act as individuals.

A small piece of that is where we live. I’d suggest much of the “mix” choice is made for us in the form of land use and transportation planning–facts on the ground–and largely in the form of excluding or limiting possibility on the one hand, or pushing us in a more constrained direction on the other. Perhaps a degree of choice is possible within that.