Maryanne Wolf has a book called Reader, Come Home about the way that Digital City is rewiring out brains to have less patience for reading. We no longer immerse ourselves in books. We no long savor great writing or re-read great passages. Sad to say, I did not have the patience to read the whole book.

I notice that my writing style now emphasizes compression. Fewer anecdotes or “throat clearing.” Get to the point.

Compression is not costless. When I listen to “Carry On” by CSNY on Spotify I don’t get the same physical thrill that I used to get from the bass-organ interlude that seemed to wash over my brain in the analog version. You don’t hear the harmonics and overtones in John Phillips’ meticulous arrangements for the Mamas and the Papas in MP3.

The other night I was downstairs dancing. The session leader, in LA, was Orly, a high-energy, carrot-topped pixie. She was playing Tefillot, a brilliantly choreographed dance that I’ve probably enjoyed doing more than a hundred times over the last few years. My wife came downstairs with her computer, and she was watching a session that was based in Denver, with a guest teacher Marcelo based in Argentina. He was teaching Smachot, a difficult dance that I have not done enough times to know. So I turned down Orly and switched to Marcelo.

Is this good or not? Why should we not just stick to one session, rather than switch back and forth? In Analog City, we go to a session, and there would be no option to jump to another session. The Analog City session would be run by a very dedicated and competent leader, who nonetheless lacks the charisma of Orly or Marcelo. The Digital City options are in some sense better, but there is not the same continuity.

It’s like the difference between skimming through Internet writing and sticking with a book. I fear we are losing the capacity for the latter.

Samuel Hammond writes,

Closed Facebook groups, subreddits, and Twitter niches are typically self-regulating or have formal moderators, and rarely cause problems. That all changes when one’s online interactions are allowed to propagate far beyond the boundaries of real-life or otherwise opt-in social networks.

. . .Facebook, for example, could easily dampen the tendency of high engagement, sensationalist content from going viral by restricting the visibility of posts that don’t originate from within your friend network or geographical area.

I am not sure how this would work. If it did work, it might prevent gossip from spreading as widely and rapidly as it does now. That in turn might attenuate the influence of gossip on our lives.

I think, though, that the key is getting people to recognize that large-scale society cannot operate by small-scale rules. A small group can adopt “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” A large, complex society cannot do so. A small group can choose not to live by liberal values and instead adopt a hard-edged moral code and live by myths and falsehoods. It works less well in large societies.

On line, people engage in small-scale social control in a large-scale setting. I suppose that trying to confine online activity to small groups is one approach for trying to stop that. I am skeptical that it can work.

Daniel A. Cox and others report,

More than three-quarters (77 percent) of white Americans report that their core social network includes only people who are also white. More than six in 10 (64 percent) black Americans have social networks composed entirely of people who are also black. Less than half of Asian Americans (49 percent) and Hispanic Americans (43 percent) have core social networks that include only members of their own race or ethnic background.

Most partisans have close social ties that reflect their political predispositions. A majority (54 percent) of Republicans report that their core social network is exclusively composed of Donald Trump supporters. The pattern is nearly identical among Democrats.

Recall the cliche that you are the average of your five closest friends.

The Internet, smart phones, and social media (ISS) have set human communication back about 20,000 years. That is, we now rely more on gossip than we have since we lived in small tribes.

1. Human evolution produced gossip. Cultural anthropology sees gossip as an informal way of enforcing group norms. It is effective in small groups. But gossip is not the search for truth. It is a search for approval by attacking the perceived flaws of others.

2. As a social enforcement mechanism, gossip does not scale. Large societies need other enforcement mechanisms: government, religion, written codes.

3. Our ISS technology changes this. It makes it possible to gossip effectively at large scale. This in turn has revived our propensity to rely on gossip. Beliefs spread without being tested for truth.

4. We have increased the power of gossip-mongers and correspondingly reduced the power of elite institutions of the 20th century, including politicians, mainstream media, and scientists.

5. The result is that we are living through a period of chaos. Symptoms include conspiracy theories, information bubbles, cancel culture, President Trump’s tweets, and widespread institutional decay and dysfunction.

6. To escape from the chaos, we will need new norms of behavior that incline us away from gossip.

I will elaborate more below. Continue reading →