culture, spin

[this post is handicapped by the fact that I can no longer find the articles I have in mind, which is a problem]

"article"

The article discusses how increasing mobility is leading to more homogeneous neighborhoods. Republicans live with Republicans, because people like to live with like-minded people. As a result, contact between those with different opinions, leading to a diminished marketplace of ideas.

"article"

The article discusses how individuals with rare tastes and passions are using the internet and modern communications to form communities. That is, I might be a little weird, but there are a thousand other weird people out there and we can all get together (on the internet) and talk about our weird interest. This is pretty cool; it decreases the homogenizing pressure to conform.

The point: both of these articles are basically about the same thing. Modern technology / mobility enables people to seek out like-minded others. One article presents this as bad, the other good - and both in terms of diversity of opinion. So consider the following distinction: "subjective diversity" is the diversity of thought that the individual is actually exposed to, "objective diversity" is the diversity of thought that is actually out there / actually accessible. In these terms, the first article laments decreasing subjective diversity, while the second article lauds the increase of objective diversity. Of course, the two feed back on one another: if each of us lives in an echo chamber, little new thought (perhaps) will be produced, leading to increased ossification of ideas and decreased objective diversity.

(Related discussion)

memory, spin, (on flaunting one's sexuality)

I had originally intended to write a post that started with an article about how female doctors who wear clothes which emphasize their secondary sex characteristics get less respect from patients than other doctors. This would have been an example of how women in general take flack for wearing “racy” clothes in professional (and, for that matter, nonprofessional) contexts. I would have gone on to discuss how traditional male garb (that is, formal men's clothes, such as suits and dress shoes) also serves to emphasize secondary sex characteristics: height, breadth of shoulders, etc.

This is the article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/21/health/21essa.html
"When Young Doctors Strut Too Much Of Their Stuff"
by Erin N. Marcus, M.D.
November 21, 2006
The New York Times

The reason I'm not writing that post (sort of) is that when I went back to find the article, I discovered something odd. It leads with a collage of photos of (presumably) female doctors in “racy” clothes. But if you pay attention, the one study it cites remarks that patients prefer that white coat to either “racy” female clothes or formal male clothes. (Various anecdotes do concern specifically feminine clothes). It's interesting, then, the way the story is spun, and the way I remembered it: those pictures fixed in my mind the point of the story; the words (the facts) did not.