Prompted by Eric’s question about the nature of modern romance I offer the following links: Knight Ridder report on a study that finds more Americans feel isolated
It found that men and women of every race, age and education level reported fewer intimate friends than the same survey turned up in 1985. Their remaining confidants were more likely to be members of their nuclear family than in 1985, according to the study, but intimacy within families was down, too. The findings are reported in the June issue of the American Sociological Review.
Kieran Healy posts a link to the relevant research paper, Social Isolation in America, at Crooked Timber.
And Bill Tozier at Notional Slurry has a long essay on estate sales, rummaging though other people’s possessions, inferring a life from clues, and erotica in the eye of the beholder.
Being an estate auctioneer grants you a certain degree of immunity. There is no sense in which the folks clearing out these three old dead guys’ houses can be cast as pornographers, just because they ended up selling pornography. Hell, if you asked them I bet they’d all say, truthfully, that they just stack it and sell it, and often as not don’t know what’s in the boxes.
…
What’s interesting — and maybe even worth the effort I took to tell the story — is this: In those small communities where the Dead Fellows lived, and where my prejudiced radical professor of an ex-neighbor no doubt assumes they are poised ready to lynch her, nobody batted an eye over the fact of these books. The auctioneer was not sanctioned for selling prohibited materials. Nobody looked askance at me, or the guy who bought the 20 David Hamilton books for $260, or the people buying 6-foot-tall nude paintings of proudly busty ladies.
But online. In the connected world, our newer “flatter” world, doesn’t it look as if the most reactionary social norm wins? I’m not being a libertarian market-monger here; I’m pointing out a limitation of connectedness: social norms don’t scale.
Long Tail, meet Social Scissors.
It’s a distinctive characteristic of online communities that the most vocal people are the biggest participants. Special interest groups, whether project-driven or general-purpose, tend to be swayed most by the biggest complainers. Those people who traditionally represented a minority in vocal, physical culture now play a role as the most influential controllers in online culture.
Somehow all of these things feel connected. Tozier is correct that online communities have very different social dynamics than face-to-face communities. The recent liberal blogosphere blowup over Kos and The New Republic illustrates the dulling sameness of flame wars. People will say things online that they would never say in person. So the most vocal complainers rise to the top of our online social world.
I know for a fact that this has had an effect on me. One of the reasons I stopped blogging for most of 2003-5 was because of blog spam, which felt like an intrusion into my online world from people who were too vocal for their own good.
Intrusions into personal privacy also seem to be on the increase. All of the domestic spying examples by the NSA that have been revealed over the last few months being but one example. The privacy of an individual book collection enabled some of the people Tozier described to be eccentric.
Eccentricity has a value to all of society. It’s in the name of my weblog because I believe that everyone should be exposed to points of view that are outside the norm. People can choose to ignore the eccentricities around them. It’s part of what a tolerant society does.
The crucial question raised by all of this is whether the online world will have the same diversity as the real world. Will it devolve to the lowest, most reactionary, social norm or will it become a new avenue through which romances bloom that could never have been thought of in the past? I think we are living in a transition time when all of these issues are still being worked out.
