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The newest issue of the Atlantic contains an article about our increasing social isolation titled: The Anti-Social Century (You can get behind the paywall here). The author of the article blames our information technologies: TV and more recently cell phones, destruction of third spaces like libraries, parks and neighborhood bars, national and international mobility, and a culture that chooses convience over forging genuine connections over time. In terms of solutions, the author posits that we need a national culture change towards a more skeptical attitude towards new technology like AI and deliberate attempts to be more social. He cites the rapid growth in independent bookstores and board game cafes as a cause for hope in this kind of change.
I'm directionally on board with the diagnosis and prognosis offered in the Atlantic article, but I worry about the vagueness and naivity of the solution. I had similar worries after reading a similar piece, the book Stolen Focus by Johann Hari, which highlighted the deleterious effects of phones on our attention spans. Hari spends a summer phone free in Provincetown, MA which he really enjoys, and manages to recover much of his attention span. However, upon returning to the "real world" he finds himself sucked right back into the vortex. Hari rightly recognizes that this is an issue he cannot tackle alone, and advocates for collective action on a national or international level. He draws inspiration from movements like women's suffrage, the fight for gay rights, and the campaign against CFCs. Perhaps I am cynical, but I find this level of optimism to be hopelessly naive for a number of reasons.
Firstly, those examples which I just listed were examples in which the forces of capital were neutral (CFCs, gay rights), or in fact in favor of the so-called revolution (women's suffrage). In this case, like that of the fight against climate change, or degrowth, capital is fundamentally against a system that would free our attention, as such a system would reduce profits.
Secondly, I'm not sure democratic change will actually work in this scenario. As we saw with prohibition & the failed war on drugs, people like their vices. I'm not sure my generation would be in favor of something like banning TikTok. Hari even states that his first week on Cape Cod was pretty difficult psychologically without the soothing mind-wipe of scrolling. Faith in democracy also misses the forces of capital arrayed against the interests of the common people who have so clearly been gaming our electoral system since the Civil War. If we can't stop Big Pharma from price gouging insulin, what makes the author think that we could upend the entire media ecosystem?
I think change fundamentally has to come from a level in-between the individual & the state (or global culture). I think many cultural critics miss the very existence of this level of culture, possibly because it has almost totally vanished from our world as an element of social change. I'm talking here about the family, the local community, and to some extent, the parishes/church.
Yet I think this new Atlantic article, and my experiences over the past few years has revealed how frustrating trying to affect change at this level can be. There might well be an explosion of board game bars and independent bookstores, but at least where I live in the US, even thriving institutions have problems with inconsistency and high turnover on the scale of years which makes it very difficult to build real community. A couple examples from my personal life might be helpful.
1). I'm pretty involved in the running community here in Baltimore and in some senses the running scene has never been better. Races are packed and the casual running clubs are seeing more people come out than ever. But the more serious running teams are doing very poorly. We can't get people out for organized workouts, or for important team races. It's very hard to build team camraderie or real friendships in this kind of environment where everyone is a flake.
2). With my local church the problem is similar. Plenty large mass attendence, but people my age aren't interested in the other ministries that the church offers: working with soup kitchen, church garden, and food pantry to help feed the homeless, book clubs, or even social events, many of which take place right after mass. In addition to the flakiness present in the running scene, there's also a geographic transience: many people are here for school or temporary work, and are not inclined to work towards any kind of more permenant community.
There are similar vibes in many of the other hobbies I take part in: gardening, swing dancing, reading: a trend towards pick-and-choose attendence of events, rather than attendence out of any sense of obligation to a particular community. I'm clearly guilty of this too: I would probably be a stronger running club participant or parishoner if I didn't have so many hobbies, although I like to think I lack the worst of the scrolling/TV vices.
I'm kind of at a loss about what we can do about all this. A big part of the problem is clearly the phones,which hopefully the upcoming Tik Tok ban will help with, but I think there's also a large element of constant geographic mobility at play at here too. I grew up in Chicago, went to college in Boston, and currently am doing my PhD in Baltimore. At each stage of life I built or was part of a community, which, in the case of the first two, I have gradually lost. The thought of the same happening with my friends here fills me with dread, but staying in Baltimore is not a rational economic prospect, and also requires that most of my friends here don't leave themselves. But if not going to stay, why would I ever want to sink my roots in deeper?
Any thoughts/advice appreciated. I also think there's a lot of value in online communities that I have found here at the Motte, in my philosophy book club (university friends), and on Substack, and I'm immensly grateful for their existence, but I don't think they can even come close to fulfilling many of the needs that meatspace does. But that's a whole seperate post.
The geographic transience is the hardest, that I have personally dealt with. Almost all of my close friends I've known for over a decade have moved away. Many of them want to come back because they're lonely, but constraints of work / family / finances make it difficult.
It's a very stupid and annoying cultural situation that everyone moves all the time. Sigh.
Geographic transience in America overall is overstated - the median American lives 18 miles from their mother.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/24/upshot/24up-family.html
The use of median rather than mean suggests a selective approach to characterizing transience relative to other parts of the world.
I don't know how it's characterized in other parts of the world, but median makes intuitive sense given that the distribution has a long right tail and it tells you what the situation of the typical American rather than an ""average"" American who may not exist in any large numbers.
It's precisely because the distribution has a long right tail that you want a mean rather than a median if you want to discuss relative differences. The relative differences are themselves located in the nature of the right-end tail.
Mean, median, and mode are all forms of averaging, but imply different things and thus serve different demonstrative / comparative purposes.
Median average is just '50% of the population is below this number, and 50% is above.' It's decent for centering on clusters, but when spectrums are non-symmetrical it's also non-representative. This can be a good thing- it's a way to ignore outliers- but it can also be a bad thing- because it ignores outliers. In the structure the claim- 'American transience is overstated'- the very premise is about the nature of the outliers (if Americans are more transient than others), but the model of averaging chosen specifically omits the role of outliers.
A mode-average is just the most common category in a set. If you broke the average distances of [distance from mother] in 20km blocks (0-20 km,20-40, etc.), a mode-average could tell you which category was the most common, but not actually what a mean or even median average was. After all, there is only 1 20-unit blocks between 0 (co-located with mother) and 20, but there are potentially infinite blocks beyond 20, but as long as more people in the single 0-20 block than in any single 20-unit block beyond it, it wouldn't matter if a hypermajority of people lived beyond 20 units from their mothers, the 'average' would still be 0-20.
Median averaging is where you'd expect to the differences in cultural differences show up in data, because the nature of the right tail is itself going to be that difference. Being a long right tail is itself a demonstration of transience compared to a population which has a short right tail. However, only a median-average would be expected to capture that if/when mode-groups or medians are skewed towards a hyper-concentrated left.
This is especially true when you consider reasons why mother and adult-child might live close other than a lack of transience. The article / you worked with an assumption that it's because people never move away in the first place (non-transient), but a transient-lifestyle could alternatively simply move back after some point (to take care of an elderly parent)... or see the parent move after the child (moving closer to the grand kids). Transience could be very high, but the median being used (heh) wouldn't reflect it. This is something that only a highly transient, but also exceptionally rich, society could do. It would have very different implications from a society where the generations never left the home village at all, even if both fit the same median average.
It's not that median-average doesn't serve very important roles, but for comparing different populations- and thus the validity of macro-trends such as relative transience- you need means.
On the contrary - it is representative in that half the people you meet will be above that number, and half below. A mean would represent a much more unusual case.
The claim is not about the nature of the outliers, it's about the nature of the median experience. The other comments in this thread talk about all or many/most people being transient and not living in a particular place for a long time. The median speaks directly against that in a way that the mean does not, because you're more likely to encounter a median American than a mean one
As for cross country comparisons, I didn't say anything about those at all. Obviously you should compare means with means and medians with medians. My point is that 18 miles is not very far, and that stands regardless of what happens in other countries.
This is a legitimate point and I'd be interested to see more data that looks at this side of the equation.
The transience of Americans being transients isn't based on how much Americans move in and of themselves- it is how much Americans move compared to non-Americans.
What happens in other countries is what matters when characterizing a relative characteristic of a country-level population (Americans), just as minority difference in the face of overwhelming similarity are key distinguishing factors in other forms of overall-population comparison.
This can go from comparisons of GDP per capita (we don't go with a median income), to comparisons of intelligence (the interesting difference in a 100 vs 120 IQ is not the 100 they have in common), to even species (the DNA overlap between humans and monkeys sharing 99.8% DNA would not imply a difference if you took a more median-concept basis of comparison).
That both Americans and non-Americans have 50% of their populations that live in the same pattern isn't what would indicate whether Americans and non-Americans significantly diverge in ways that drive a population-level characterization.
Again, I never implied anything about any relative characteristics. My point is that 18 miles is not much in an absolute sense.
Median income is often more useful for the same reasons I describe above, and the same goes for the rest of your points (although I must again stress that between country comparisons have nothing to do with my claim).
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