Alex Wright

Red books, blue books and the radius of trust

October 17, 2004

Caterina points to Valdis Krebs' diagram of implicit communities visible in Amazon's patterns of political book recommendations.

While the polarization of American politics hardly comes as news, this visualizatoin paints a stark picture of just how far apart our politics have drifted. Along with cable news, computer-assisted direct marketing and increasingly narrowcast political campaigns, technologies like Amazon's book recommendations help contribute to what Francis Fukuyama called "the miniaturization of community":

There has in fact been an important transformation in the nature of American civil society, which probably also applies to other Western developed countries... The important changes are qualitative, in the nature of the groups that tend to predominated today and in the character of the moral relationships that exist between individuals in the broader society. The most obvious way to reconcile lower levels of trust and greater levels of group membership has to do with the a reduction in what has been called the radius of trust. That shrinking "radius of trust" underlies the Amazon diagram. And just as our political dialogue takes place in the increasingly insulated rhetorical spheres of O'Reilly and Coulter, Franken and Stewart, we can see Fukuyama's predictions of miniaturized communities already playing out.

"Even worse," Fukuyama warns, "would be a situation in which people retreated into bigoted or actively aggressive groups that diminished the larger society's stock of trust." Watch five minutes of the O'Reilly Factor or The Daily Show, and you realize that it may already be too late.

File under: Semantic Web

_____________________
« Google desktop search | Richard Anderson »