Human being by nature are not racist, we normally like to mix with people who do not look or think like us. But at the same time we also have a general bias, we tend to prefer the company of people who are like us in some way or the other. People from a same community will live together, people speaking same language feel more at home with each other, people with same
political view gel pretty well. Can you imagine a congress politician subscribing to
BJP newsletter.
Like everything, In a overall
neutral society we have small polarised sections. These formation happen gradually in a real world.
In 1971, economist Thomas Schelling performed a very simple experiment with a very strong result. He began his experiment by drawing a grid of squares on a piece of paper creating a pattern resembling an
over sized checkerboard. Each square
representing a house lot. He then randomly placed a black and white marker in some of these squares. Black and white representing Black and White people. Assuming the
community to be fully
integrated now, blacks and white living together with no preferences. He made one assumption now, if the percentage of the neighbors of the same color fell beyond 50% the family would move to nearest square to meet this need. Assuming this he started moving the squares and soon realised the board was totally segregated. All whites on one side and all blacks on the other.
He explained "small incentives, almost
imperceptionable differentials, can lead to highly polarized results". Meaning, social realities are fashioned not only by the desires of people but by the action of blind or mechanical forces.
Though this kind of polarization takes a lot of time to happen in the real world where there are many hurdles to be crossed to reach this polarization. A family will look in to hundreds of thing before changing the neighbourhood.
Now,
imagine a world where there are no such hurdles, where people can move around at will to there nearest
neighbourhood, or even better, where people can create there own neighbourhood.
A world where there are no speed breakers: the web.
With lots of cool things around and
Googles, yahoos, amazons,
microsofts of the world providing, tracking and
encashing on personal needs of the people. We live in communities, where we want to live in. We interact with people who talk like us, think like us...blog like us. The blogs/communities/sites/portals we visit link to places which are
similar in nature. The web is moving towards Radical Personalization, and most of the time we don't have any control over the content that is fed to us. Somebody is tracking our behaviour by the clicks we have made in past. Our window is becoming narrower day by day.
Our online communities are polarized, we are able to find
like minded people very easily on the web. It is well founded thought that
deliberation between like minded people leads to ideological amplification. The more we interact with like minded people, the more radical our ideas become. With no critics around we see the world through a very limited window and through great confidence. The Web 2.o generation is a
generation with radical ideas. It is affecting our lives.
We Indians were never radical in our nature,
with nations living inside nation, it was always impossible to have polarized nation. We have always interacted with people with various
communities and different ideologies and hence were never radical in nature. But things may not be same in future.Examples: What is happing in Maharastra is triggered by relatively young leadership. We are seeing avery radical face of religion and terrorism who hire and operate via web.
Learned form 'The Big Switch' by Nicholas Carr.
