People will cluster into cultural "regions" based not on physical proximity but on mutual attitudes

[koganbot]

At the very end of my Why Music Sucks broadside of February 1987 I wrote a paragraph that in retrospect might seem supernaturally prophetic. Whereas now, such a paragraph, with a few of the words changed, would be the common, received wisdom. However, despite almost every sentence of it being right, I think it's fundamentally wrong. But see for

Comments

[skyecaptain]

It was fundamentally wrong because without that regionalization you never woulda met all these crazy people who comment on your LJ! Woo!

Anyway, I think to a great extent we still have to deal with those unlike us, not just in a professional or "official" context that can be cordoned off from the rest of our existence. Like, you still have hear music in the grocery store; you still might watch the news occasionally; you still might _______. And you can always seek out that opposition, or throw yourself into a conversation slightly out of your depth and learn to swim, but only if you're a somewhat adventurous person.

But then, if you aren't already a somewhat adventurous person, who's to say you'd really be all that willing to engage with people whom you disagreed with regardless of how much you "had" to do so? Just call 'em a witch, burn 'em, call it a day. (And even if we don't call for real witches, we often construct ones made of straw, which suggests a mass out there which we yearn to engage, even if we're too chickenshit to

[skyecaptain]

This also sort of assumes that different sections of our personal and public lives naturally overlap -- i.e. our music is our politics, our film taste is our food taste, our sneakers are our philosophies. And to some extent this is certainly true, but to just as important an extent it isn't true -- one issue with PBS as a Lonely Hearts network is that it limits what you can do with all of your leisure, all of your politics, all of the many facets of your life. But then you might still be an orthodontist as opposed to a choreographer, etc. etc. There are some mutual attitudes that simply don't mix in any meaningful way, and there are a ton of not necessarily mutually compatible (though not incompatible either) parts of our personality that we all carry around with us at any given time -- be it a love of Kuhn and a love of Aly and AJ, or a love of documentary film and a love of Grizzly Bear, or a love of Republican dogma and a love of alpaca farming. I think to some extent an attempt to bridge a few of these gaps may close mutual

[edgeofwhatever]

Anyway, I think to a great extent we still have to deal with those unlike us, not just in a professional or "official" context that can be cordoned off from the rest of our existence. Like, you still have hear music in the grocery store; you still might watch the news occasionally; you still might _______.

Also, it's odd to assume that when people cluster into regions based on "mutual attitudes, tastes, hobbies, beliefs, etc.," they will cluster in such a way that they all share all of those things -- there's no reason why people with the same hobby would also hold the same beliefs or have the same tastes. I mean, we're all yammering on about music on the Internet, but we're not all yammering about the same music, and we're not all doing it for the same reasons. Even when you retire to your "supportive people-like-me network," you still have to encounter and deal with people who are unlike you.

[skyecaptain]

I've always been pissed that S. Reynolds never really fought back on my terms during the Paris Wars because "what do I stand with if I stand with Paris?" is a question that deserves answering. Who actually listened to it, and how, and what did they think and feel about it? Who are these people with whom I seem to be identifying? (This is, again, why strawmen can be important, too -- I'm not convinced there IS a cogent audience for Paris, it's probably an incredibly diffuse and disparate one, but there's a perception of a "mass" of consumers who idolize her in a positive way. I argued at the time that "no one admits liking Paris Hilton without reservation," but I have no evidence for that, just as the haters had no evidence that anyone DID like her without reservation.)

Pieces parts

[koganbot]

Pasting in a conversation I had yesterday with Mark over on this threaddubdobdee