For decades now retail commerce, along with so much else in our lives, has been "rolled up," as we say in business. It has become the province of ever larger and larger companies, selling goods out of ever larger and larger stores, employing an ever greater share of the workforce. Which makes for fewer small stores and more impersonal relationships at them. This is a commonplace, and many have spoken of their yearning for a return to a more personal relationship with their merchants. Here's a post I wrote about it a few years back.
At the same time, the media landscape has gone in the opposite direction. From 3 TV networks plus PBS and some syndicators we have gone to however many cable channels there are plus the web plus podcasters. Many have written about this too, I'm sure I have.
People do interact with one another out here in cyber land, but it tends to be entirely like-minded folks communing together, and without the superegoic guardrails that interacting with one another IRL imposes. People just pile on and say whatever the fuck they want out there on the internet because they know there's little chance of serious reprisal, which would have been less the case out there in the real world when you ran into people at the hardware and grocery store more regularly. It's not that I have any illusions about the degree of consensual repression that was present in small towns, but I think there was likely less vitriol.
People do still need to see each other and we create social contexts and institutions in which to do so, but the factor of randomness in bringing people together out there in meatland has been dialled down. And random interactions with Others in a situation where people are constrained by manners breeds a measure of tolerance and mutual understanding, when people are geared right.
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