/Film reported that there’s a movie in the works based on an article in GQ called “Will You Be My Black Friend?” There was a link to the original article, which was a fun read with a good eye for detail and reflection.
But this especially caught my eye (emphasis mine):
There’s a psychological term that’s used to explain why white people and black people aren’t friends: homophily. It means that people are likely to be friends with those who are similar to them. (There’s an aphorism about homophily: “Birds of a feather flock together.” One of the peculiar duties of social scientists is to prove the most obvious things, make them seem complicated, and then reconstitute them as simple. For examples, see the work of Malcolm Gladwell.) I would argue that the modern world is, in many quarters, dominated by increasingly extreme homophily. If you don’t want to, you’ll never have to talk to anyone whose jeans are different from yours. And there’s the trend toward so-called cultural cocooning, where you only have to listen to people who have the same opinion as you, be it on Fox or MSNBC or Lou Dobbs, depending on if your philosophy is galvanized around conservatism or liberalism or angry people with wet piano keys for teeth.
I’ve seen many a presentation or blog post that raves on how the Internet and especially social media will make us more informed readers. The reasoning goes that if you’re interested in something, say like the current economic crisis, you can use social media to read about it from a variety of different sources and from different viewpoints. Compared to the Average Joe who only gets his news from the evening news and the local newspaper, this social media reader and his pluralistic worldview is painted as almost an “undupable” force of nature that will save society as we know it from the manipulators (and killing traditional journalism along the way).
The truth is, as you might have guessed, somewhat different. Media technologies are always cultural and social systems; the possibility of some kind of behavior with a media technology doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily going to happen. For example, you already see worrisome examples of partisanship in the US where conservatives and liberals only listen to their favorite talking heads and get their news and the interpretation of the news from like-minded folk online. This makes mutual discourse with people outside of you’re “cocoon” increasingly difficult as the shared understandings are eroded.
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