A fragmented world
I spend a lot of time in my job thinking about landscape fragmentation, the splintering of the land into smaller and smaller parcels, each subject to different ownership and different management. As I’ve discussed before, this is in a sense very democratic- a large proportion of Americans own a little plot of land and gain the economic benefits that entails. Still, the result has not been some Jeffersonian agrarian landscape, but suburbia. All this fragmentation has made land conservation very difficult, as a myriad environmental NGOs chase after ever smaller parcels of land, not to mention some of the other problems of sprawl.
I’ve been realizing though that it’s not just the land that’s becoming more fragmented. Within the US, the demographic data clearly show that our neighborhoods are becoming more and more segregated by class, the rich living with the rich, the poor with the poor. Internationally the situation is even starker: the average middle-class American will never see how the one-sixth of humanity in slums truly lives. Incredibly, Americans are as segregated by race now than they were during the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Perhaps most ominous for us as a democracy, our neighborhoods are now mostly of a single party-affiliation, meaning spirited political debates in public places are all too often a thing of the past.
Indeed, perhaps we live in the era of fragmentation, when we lose the experience of having a shared culture and instead retreat into our own world. The Internet, especially, has fragmented the media bubble. We now all, more and more, consume the news we want, tending to read sources with biases we already share. It’s not that this tendency is completely new- it’s always been there, we’ve all lived in different worlds to some extent. But now the Internet, which so many dreamed would break down barriers (and occasionally can) seems to be more often reifying them: the fragmented world keeps cracking into ever smaller pieces.
I’ve been realizing though that it’s not just the land that’s becoming more fragmented. Within the US, the demographic data clearly show that our neighborhoods are becoming more and more segregated by class, the rich living with the rich, the poor with the poor. Internationally the situation is even starker: the average middle-class American will never see how the one-sixth of humanity in slums truly lives. Incredibly, Americans are as segregated by race now than they were during the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Perhaps most ominous for us as a democracy, our neighborhoods are now mostly of a single party-affiliation, meaning spirited political debates in public places are all too often a thing of the past.
Indeed, perhaps we live in the era of fragmentation, when we lose the experience of having a shared culture and instead retreat into our own world. The Internet, especially, has fragmented the media bubble. We now all, more and more, consume the news we want, tending to read sources with biases we already share. It’s not that this tendency is completely new- it’s always been there, we’ve all lived in different worlds to some extent. But now the Internet, which so many dreamed would break down barriers (and occasionally can) seems to be more often reifying them: the fragmented world keeps cracking into ever smaller pieces.
