Last May I picked up a copy (before the days of Kindle) of Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart. A distant cousin to Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone noting generational changes in values over the 20th century that left fewer and fewer of us finding the League of Women Voters, or the Shriners, or the monthly bridge club, or even a Sunday picnic with friends, as it no longer fits the way we have come to live. The Big Sort is an examination of how relative stable economic times since the mid 1970’s have allowed Americans to relocate and self sort along a myriad of dimensions.
From Publishers Weekly
In the Big Sort Bishop contends that as Americans have moved over the past three decades, they have clustered in communities of sameness, among people with similar ways of life, beliefs, and in the end, politics. There are endless variations of this clustering—what Bishop dubs the Big Sort—as like-minded Americans self-segregate in states, cities—even neighborhoods. Consequences of the Big Sort are dire: balkanized communities whose inhabitants find other Americans to be culturally incomprehensible; a growing intolerance for political differences that has made national consensus impossible; and politics so polarized that Congress is stymied and elections are no longer just contests over policies, but bitter choices between ways of life. Bishop's argument is meticulously researched—surveys and polls proliferate—and his reach is broad. He splices statistics with snippets of sociological theory and case studies of specific towns to illustrate that while the Big Sort enervates government, it has been a boon to advertisers and churches, to anyone catering to and targeting taste. Bishop's portrait of our post materialistic society will probably generate chatter; the idea is catchy, but demonstrating that like does attract like becomes an exercise in redundancy.
As it’s hard for me to go out now without someone bringing up the cult of facebook, I couldn’t help but think over the past weekend that perhaps facebook (or any other broad reaching on-line social network for that matter) might serve as mediator to the Big Sort tendency.
A friend was recounting a story about how a friend jokingly referred to him as a “porn star” on his wall. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to leave it up because now his conservative great aunt was on facebook. I’m not making an argument for or against self-censorship; I think that’s a personal choice. What I am excited about though is my friend, his randy mate, and his great aunt, are all part of the same community for the first time… well probably ever.
A couple of years ago social networking was a huge youth market, with a couple of old guys like me participating in hopes of figuring out how to sell to them. Now that the late majority has arrived on facebook, it’s beginning to fracture the population in interesting ways. I’m beginning to notice a de-sorting. With 25 years behind us the class of 1982 has gone in a variety of directions-- some of them decidedly not New York liberal media elites, and I like that. Conversation is good.
One of the tendencies that Bishop noted in the big sort is when people of any ideological group left, right, fundamentalist to environmentalist, are isolated as a monoculture they tend to drift further in the direction of extremism. Far be it from me to say Facebook is bringing back mixed ideological communities, but I’m curious to see how this added layer might change attitudes over time.
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