The notion that big cities are fertile turf for open minds is under attack, reports Ryan Sager in the Wall Street Journal (3/31/12). Two new research reports “on friendship and people’s cellphone habits” suggest “that the bigger our pond, the smaller we may make our world.” (…)
It finds “that users of iPhones and Android devices constitute two distinct ‘tribes,’ with far more contact among members of each tribe than between tribes.”
A similar phenomenon applies to “ideas and opinions,” which “like product preferences, can spread virally and congeal into conventional wisdom. Cities thus risk becoming incubators of groupthink.”
Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class, concurs:
“Though big cities have more than their share of trailblazers, with gentrification they’re attracting more risk-averse, group oriented types,” he says, adding: “Hipster urban cultures can be just as monolithic, homogenous and creativity-squelching as any other.”
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“Concurs” must be the new word for “contradicts everything I’ve been telling all the suckers who pay me huge sums of cash for the last ten years.”
Once again, liberal research belatedly, reluctantly, confirming conservative intuition — see who else but Sailer circa 2001 — traditional wisdom; the honest/drunken admissions of anyone who’s lived in Toronto for more than six months/during the World Cup; and the evidence of our senses:
People like being around people like themselves.
Tribalism is good and natural.
If being “born gay” is “good,” then being “born tribal” is good, too. Because I say so.
Whitey seems to be the only one determined to cure it like cancer, however.
