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There's a story about Pauline Kael, film critic for the New Yorker back in the 1960's and 70s. In 1972, when Richard Nixon won a landslide in the US Presidential elections she apparently remarked "I can't believe he won. I don't know anyone who voted for him."
Anyway. A couple of years before that an American Geographer with the wonderful name of Waldo Tobler postulated his first law. For reasons which escape me this has never become known as Tobler One, which just goes to show that geography isn't a subject which attracts witty people, but what Toblers First Law of Geography says is that: "Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things." I was thinking about Tobler's first law today, like you do, and it struck me as I did so that it was as applicable to the geography of the mind and ideas as it is physical geography and indeed, as social media continues it's ever-growing ubiquity and the human population grows ever more urbanised it is going to become more true, not less.
What it suggests, you see, is that ideas seek out nearness and social media allows something to happen for everyone which was once the preserve of only the rich and dedicated - the ability to self-select our social circle. Once upon a time, when a greater proportion of the population lived in villages, the vast majority of people had no choice over the people they knew and associated with. Yes, you might disagree and argue in the pub, but you'd have to go back to the same pub the next day. In short, unless you were rich or a member of a really dedicated and isolationist religious sect you would have to associate with people you had nothing in common with - and at some level most of the time you'd have to find some sort of common ground just for social harmony.
This held less true in urban areas - there were so many people that you could find a like-minded group and associate with them (I remember being at a dinner party many years ago and saying something which didn't meet the received wisdom of the group. "You can't say that!" one of them told me, open-mouthed with horror. "I just did", I replied, perfectly accurately) but even then your social circle would like contain members of the out-group.
When Google launched Google Earth back in 2005, they quickly noticed that people didn't use it at all how they expected. What they thought would happen is that people, presented with an interactive representation of the entire world, would use it to look at places they'd never been: "I wonder what the Pyramids/Pyongyang*/Macchu Picchu look like". What actually happened is that almost every single person they showed it to did the same thing. They went to look at where they lived, and the places nearby. In other words, they used Google Earth to find out what the places they saw every single day looked like. Instead of looking at new things, people said "Hey! You can see my house from here!" and it struck me that this is a good representative macrocosm of how people use social media.
One of the defining features of contemporary political debate is that it seems to have become more polarised than anything I can remember before. America has its culture wars, and they seem to be seeping into discourse in this country too. And I can't help but think that the internet - and it's effects upon the geography of the mind - is one of the causes of that because it allows people to self-select their social circles in an unprecedented way. "If there's one thing I don't much like, it's foreigners", you might say to yourself. "Stormfront, that's the web community for me". Or "I don't know anything about economics, but I do love little kittens. I'll read something by Polly Toynbee or Owen Jones" , and hey presto not only does this present you with a dataset which is immediately skewed towards a certain position ("Have you seen what them Muslims/capitalists are doing now?") but also provides a ready-made social circle of people who agree with the basic premises of the group and whom you would not previously have encountered because you occupy different physical space.
It's human nature that people become normalised to their group, and when the group holds a clear set of opinions then those opinions will seem normal even when they are by wider social norms unusual or or not representative - and when people becomce normalised to the group then people outside become other, and it's really easy to dislike the other. Because they're wrong. They're the extremists, and they hate everything that is good and true and which your social group agrees are good and true.
In the same way that Tobler One says our minds see closer physical or geographical features as being more related and so more important, so the internet makes it possible to make ideas seem closer to us. It has shifted mental geography so concepts which might seem unimportant in isolation can be moved closer through social media, and become normalised: and that, I reckon, underlies the bitterness of political debate. Why should anyone vote for that party? Nobody I know does...and from that it's an easy step to assuming that anyone who does so is other, and thus wrong, or bad, or downright evil. Nice people think like me, so they must be nasty. That's logic and stuff, innit.
I dunno; maybe I'm wrong, but I can't help but think that the self-selection of self-reinforcing social groups isn't a good thing. In fact I'd suggest it's positively harmful, and I reckon it's one of the things something the 21st century will be about.
*When I'm bored I do sometimes go and look at North Korea on Google Earth. Apparently the government there warn the people that decadent, capitalist westerners are spying on them for outer space and I don't like to disappoint them.
Anyway. A couple of years before that an American Geographer with the wonderful name of Waldo Tobler postulated his first law. For reasons which escape me this has never become known as Tobler One, which just goes to show that geography isn't a subject which attracts witty people, but what Toblers First Law of Geography says is that: "Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things." I was thinking about Tobler's first law today, like you do, and it struck me as I did so that it was as applicable to the geography of the mind and ideas as it is physical geography and indeed, as social media continues it's ever-growing ubiquity and the human population grows ever more urbanised it is going to become more true, not less.
What it suggests, you see, is that ideas seek out nearness and social media allows something to happen for everyone which was once the preserve of only the rich and dedicated - the ability to self-select our social circle. Once upon a time, when a greater proportion of the population lived in villages, the vast majority of people had no choice over the people they knew and associated with. Yes, you might disagree and argue in the pub, but you'd have to go back to the same pub the next day. In short, unless you were rich or a member of a really dedicated and isolationist religious sect you would have to associate with people you had nothing in common with - and at some level most of the time you'd have to find some sort of common ground just for social harmony.
This held less true in urban areas - there were so many people that you could find a like-minded group and associate with them (I remember being at a dinner party many years ago and saying something which didn't meet the received wisdom of the group. "You can't say that!" one of them told me, open-mouthed with horror. "I just did", I replied, perfectly accurately) but even then your social circle would like contain members of the out-group.
When Google launched Google Earth back in 2005, they quickly noticed that people didn't use it at all how they expected. What they thought would happen is that people, presented with an interactive representation of the entire world, would use it to look at places they'd never been: "I wonder what the Pyramids/Pyongyang*/Macchu Picchu look like". What actually happened is that almost every single person they showed it to did the same thing. They went to look at where they lived, and the places nearby. In other words, they used Google Earth to find out what the places they saw every single day looked like. Instead of looking at new things, people said "Hey! You can see my house from here!" and it struck me that this is a good representative macrocosm of how people use social media.
One of the defining features of contemporary political debate is that it seems to have become more polarised than anything I can remember before. America has its culture wars, and they seem to be seeping into discourse in this country too. And I can't help but think that the internet - and it's effects upon the geography of the mind - is one of the causes of that because it allows people to self-select their social circles in an unprecedented way. "If there's one thing I don't much like, it's foreigners", you might say to yourself. "Stormfront, that's the web community for me". Or "I don't know anything about economics, but I do love little kittens. I'll read something by Polly Toynbee or Owen Jones" , and hey presto not only does this present you with a dataset which is immediately skewed towards a certain position ("Have you seen what them Muslims/capitalists are doing now?") but also provides a ready-made social circle of people who agree with the basic premises of the group and whom you would not previously have encountered because you occupy different physical space.
It's human nature that people become normalised to their group, and when the group holds a clear set of opinions then those opinions will seem normal even when they are by wider social norms unusual or or not representative - and when people becomce normalised to the group then people outside become other, and it's really easy to dislike the other. Because they're wrong. They're the extremists, and they hate everything that is good and true and which your social group agrees are good and true.
In the same way that Tobler One says our minds see closer physical or geographical features as being more related and so more important, so the internet makes it possible to make ideas seem closer to us. It has shifted mental geography so concepts which might seem unimportant in isolation can be moved closer through social media, and become normalised: and that, I reckon, underlies the bitterness of political debate. Why should anyone vote for that party? Nobody I know does...and from that it's an easy step to assuming that anyone who does so is other, and thus wrong, or bad, or downright evil. Nice people think like me, so they must be nasty. That's logic and stuff, innit.
I dunno; maybe I'm wrong, but I can't help but think that the self-selection of self-reinforcing social groups isn't a good thing. In fact I'd suggest it's positively harmful, and I reckon it's one of the things something the 21st century will be about.
*When I'm bored I do sometimes go and look at North Korea on Google Earth. Apparently the government there warn the people that decadent, capitalist westerners are spying on them for outer space and I don't like to disappoint them.
