Say goodbye where the rainbows end
Marketers (and political pollsters) have sliced up the population into increasingly “microtargeted” segments. The three-network era of mass media, which helped create a national hearth of shared references and values, is long gone, displaced by a new media landscape that has splintered us into thousands of insular tribes. We can no longer even agree on what used to be called facts: Conservatives watch Fox; liberals watch MSNBC. Blogs and RSS feeds now make it easy to produce and inhabit a cultural universe tailored to fit your social values, your musical preferences, your view on every single political issue. We’re bowling alone — or at least only with people who resemble us, and agree with us, in nearly every conceivable way.
This separation into solipsistic blocs would perhaps not be so complete if people of different political views or cultural values at least lived within hailing distance, and encountered one another on the street or in the store from time to time. But, increasingly, they don’t. Over the last decade, as 100 million Americans have moved from one place to another, they’ve clustered in increasingly homogeneous communities. (…)
This intense geographic sorting helps account for an abiding weirdness in American politics. Congress is split right down the middle, or nearly so; the last two presidential elections have been achingly close; half the nation, almost by definition, must disagree with you politically — and yet you have probably met very few of your antagonists. “How can the polls be neck and neck,” the playwright Arthur Miller lamented during the 2004 election, “when I don’t know one Bush supporter?”
