On Thu, 2008-11-06 at 11:27 -0600, Chetan Vemuri wrote:
> I think I butchered that entire idea and may have misrepresented him
I don't think so.
> but
> that's what I got and I think he's right, in light of what I've seen with
> these figures throughout my high school and college years, even now in my
> sophomore year, as I walk down the street.
It looks to me like the past four or five decades brought us some pretty
interesting developments. In philosophy and politics we abstracted
certain civil rights movements and discovered or invented "identity
politics". In commerce we pushed more heavily than ever before on the
concept of a "demographic" and began to think of demographics as
something that can be deliberately manufactured, shaped, controlled, and
used[*]. The two go hand in hand.
At the same time, we found our built environments and social and
economic arrangements changing in newly polarizing and isolating ways.
For example, we suffered huge losses in public spaces and events where
diverse people gather and mingle and interact and became more "zoned" so
that some people "belong" in some areas and not others with
transgressions against that sense of propriety giving rise various forms
of profiling-based response. Perceived injustices in that situation in
turn fuel the discourse on identity politics and the construction and
manipulation of demographics.
So, you've got that complex of things -- identity politics, modern
demographic theory, and a highly zoned and polarized environment.
Styles, choices of association, economic opportunity, educational
opportunity and so on all get distorted through that complex of things.
And, ironically, a lot of the "self-dressing" people do as they adopt
various identities is discussed as if it were a project in liberation!
-t
[*] About modern demographics seeking to construct and manipulate new
demographics, it's quite insidious and reaches all the way down into
early-childhood pedagogy. For example, makers of children's
entertainment are seen to try and create "children's fashions" targeted
to narrow age groups, for limited periods of time, in highly targeted
ways --- the business aim being for businesses to be able to directly
and indirectly recall those early childhood identifications later in
life and build new demographics out of what was originally a
partitioning of children through pedagogy.
> I think I butchered that entire idea and may have misrepresented him
I don't think so.
> but
> that's what I got and I think he's right, in light of what I've seen with
> these figures throughout my high school and college years, even now in my
> sophomore year, as I walk down the street.
It looks to me like the past four or five decades brought us some pretty
interesting developments. In philosophy and politics we abstracted
certain civil rights movements and discovered or invented "identity
politics". In commerce we pushed more heavily than ever before on the
concept of a "demographic" and began to think of demographics as
something that can be deliberately manufactured, shaped, controlled, and
used[*]. The two go hand in hand.
At the same time, we found our built environments and social and
economic arrangements changing in newly polarizing and isolating ways.
For example, we suffered huge losses in public spaces and events where
diverse people gather and mingle and interact and became more "zoned" so
that some people "belong" in some areas and not others with
transgressions against that sense of propriety giving rise various forms
of profiling-based response. Perceived injustices in that situation in
turn fuel the discourse on identity politics and the construction and
manipulation of demographics.
So, you've got that complex of things -- identity politics, modern
demographic theory, and a highly zoned and polarized environment.
Styles, choices of association, economic opportunity, educational
opportunity and so on all get distorted through that complex of things.
And, ironically, a lot of the "self-dressing" people do as they adopt
various identities is discussed as if it were a project in liberation!
-t
[*] About modern demographics seeking to construct and manipulate new
demographics, it's quite insidious and reaches all the way down into
early-childhood pedagogy. For example, makers of children's
entertainment are seen to try and create "children's fashions" targeted
to narrow age groups, for limited periods of time, in highly targeted
ways --- the business aim being for businesses to be able to directly
and indirectly recall those early childhood identifications later in
life and build new demographics out of what was originally a
partitioning of children through pedagogy.