Empowered To Sort Myself
Three major trends are driving the consumer marketplace, and, indeed, society at large. Purpose. Well-being. And empowerment. It is the latter that is most important for "the big sort" described by Bill Bishop.
People now have access to information that they have never had access to before. The Internet is the chief reason, but education, income and time make it possible for people to engage the Internet in this fashion. Couple all of that with the steadily eroding trust that people have in institutions and authorities - something Bill Bishop discusses in detail in The Big Sort - and you have a perfect storm of individual empowerment.
But just to be clear, this empowerment is not rooted in trivial things like the ability to PhotoShop pictures or upload videos to YouTube. Empowerment is fundamentally driven by access to information.
Most obviously, people now have access to price information they never had access to before. But it's far more than just that. Peer reviews, health tips, Wikipedia, Google, bloggers, news sites, videos, images, you name it. People are awash in information along with increasingly better tools to manage it. The single biggest change in American society and the consumer marketplace in the last 50 years, if not more, is this change in access to information.
As any marketer can tell you, whoever controls information rules the marketplace. Unsurprisingly, then, we are in the midst of a radical shift in power and control. We are seeing this first in the consumer marketplace but it is true in every aspect of our lives.
So what does this have to do with "the big sort" described by Bishop? Lots, actually, but the biggest impact is on our ability to make choices. We know more than ever before about everything of importance to us and so we are able to make smarter, better informed decisions about the things that matter to us, like where we live.
As I've written before, we are making decisions about where to live on the basis of lifestyles not politics. Since our lifestyle choices are better informed than ever before we are able to effect better matches than ever before. This means that we are increasingly likely to settle in places where our values and tastes are shared by everyone else. Better lifestyle fits; less diversity. This is the big sort.
As individual empowerment continues to grow with ever greater access to more and more information, so will our geographic insularity. We will have the ability to sort ourselves ever more effectively. Mind you, demographic trends mean that we will live in a more diverse nation than ever before. Yet, geographic trends mean that we will experience this diversity only from the outside looking in. Our future looks like this -- a diverse nation self-sorted in a big way into ever more parochial pockets of like-mindedness. It's not a pretty picture.
Just not sure what's so ugly about this. How in the world would I and a right wing fundamentalist Christian be any happier if we were next door neighbors?
July 24, 2008 11:47 AM | Reply | Permalink
Agreed, and yet ---
When you and that right wing fundamentalist Christian (remember when he came over and shoveled your driveway last winter?) live in the same community each may moderate -- reduce the stridency and assuredness of -- the other's views.
Live in different counties? Not so much.
July 24, 2008 12:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
I really don't think my stridency needs reduction!
July 24, 2008 3:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
I have yet to see any proof that geography is polarizing Americans. Seriously, where is the evidence that would prove this? It's not as if rural dwellers have to wait until Sunday to pull the horse out of the fields to hitch him to the wagon and drive to town, nor do city dwellers have to wait until Sunday for the trolley cars to make the trip to the rural amusement parks. Almost all people who have some internet access or satelite tv have the option of reading and viewing the same news sources even more so now that small town papers are being bought up as advertising vehicles or simply closed. The gay couple in the city doesn't necessarily have to stay in the city for all eternity and just because they live in the city doesn't mean that they don't work in the suburbs or know people who do.
What seems to have changed isn't a trend to self-sorting by the electorate, what has changed is the direction of the parties from local party bosses calling the shots to the national party directing the action, refusing to risk financial resources on unknowns or less than a sure thing, top down gerrymandering the most marketable districts with the result that the parties no longer compete in races, they concentrate expenditures in sure things.
July 24, 2008 12:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Since our lifestyle choices are better informed than ever before we are able to effect better matches than ever before. This means that we are increasingly likely to settle in places where our values and tastes are shared by everyone else."
So? I'm not seeing this as a big issue for individuals and I don't really agree that people are gathering a ton of comparative lifestyle information before they choose where to live.
1) People move fairly frequently, few stay in the same home for 20+ years
2) Many people move because of employment - whether a relocation with a current employer or to a new employer.
3) Most people mind their own business and are not actively seeking out lifestyle information about their neighbors
4) People are only likely to look for neighborhoods that match their "lifestyle" when their "lifestyle" might be perceived negatively or they could be subject to violence. For example, if you are in an inter-racial relationship, you may choose to avoid renting/buying a home in neighborhoods that have lots of Confederate flags flying, but you are not going to pull Census data to identify zipcodes with the highest population of mixed race couples before you make your choice.
July 24, 2008 1:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
I thought that big suburbs have that effect, namely, to separate places where people live according to relatively narrow income bands. You have that in cities too, but with less of separation. By the way of contrast, in a more rural area you can have a trailer park quite close to expensive houses.
Internet communities are a new phenomenon. You can keep in touch with people that have similar views regardless of where they live, and perhaps avoid intellectual contact, including access to information, with people of different views. However, right wing had such communities, in the form of talk radio, for a long time, so internet provides a medium more congenial to liberals and progressive who somehow are less prone to follow radio shows.
I suspect that the overall effect will be positive, smaller cost of entry into information markets, more ideas, more brands, more products.
July 24, 2008 2:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
You've got it, piotr. I grew up in a few suburbs - middle to upper-middle class - in the 50s and 60s. Those were about as sorted as you can get. Since then I've lived within major cities and in small to mid-sized towns - much more diverse. Now, it's true that some larger portion of Americans is in the sterile suburbs than when I was growing up there; and it's further true that those suburbs are worse, due especially to an embrace of dehumanizing architecture by the big developers who've built the recent ones. Nobody in touch with themselves would live there, so we're left with cesspools of shallowness, alienation, and neurosis.
But that's nothing to do with the Internet, mobility, as so on. What we're seeing is those suburbs fall conclusively out of cultural favor. City centers and small towns are back. People are mixing it up again. The richness of life is returning. There hasn't been a single shopping mall built in the US in the last year - and won't many in the future. The sorted life is but a remnant, fast passing, soon to be retro.
July 25, 2008 12:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
Some of my best friends live in big city suburbs. If you are a gregarious type, you can use your large suburban home to entertain friends from the entire metropolitan area, and be invited in turn. My less gregarious friend has a longer commute although he lives in an "inner suburb" with a town center (an inner suburb of Chicago has a longer drive to downtown than in Atlanta).
I mentioned internet because it creates "communities" that break the limits of geographic proximity and allow a mental kind of sorting. You can have Democrats and Republicans accessing mutually exclusive information sources etc. This actually decreases the link between lifestyle and politics. The other day a Kossak was reporting his experiences from a gated community in Georgia where he is a very rare liberal.
July 25, 2008 7:12 PM | Reply | Permalink