The Internet and segregation

MANIFESTO

I've just about finished reading Nick Carr's (Coginchaug '77, Dartmouth '81, recent guest on The Colbert Report) latest opus, The Big Switch, wherein he avers

that the direction of the digital revolution has a strong historical corollary: electrification. Carr argues that computing, no longer personal, is going the way of a power utility.

Carr also posits that the Internet isn't the great big happy family that some would have it. Rather, he cites Nobel Prize laureate, Thomas C. Schelling's, famous segregation model experiment. An explanation can be found here, but suffice it to say that the experiment demonstrates that people tend to consort with their own kind—be they smokers, horse enthusiasts, white, black, or brown. This has been on my mind recently as a number of campaigns have tried to differentiate between "real Americans" and others.

I mention this only because Carr relates this phenomenon to the Internet—and specifically to blogs. That is, he opines that people have a tendency only to seek out those blogs where their own opinions are confirmed.

I have to admit that I'm certainly guilty of this, reading only the type of blogs that are listed to the right and avoiding such hideous mewlings as this one and this one.

I suppose I shouldn't be so parochial about this kind of thing, but there it is.

And speaking of blogging, Andrew Sullivan (whom, when all is said and done, I still have serious misgivings about) examines the phenomenon in an article in the latest Atlantic.