Technology and Anthropology

[Alex]

To follow up a little bit on my last post.

Part of it is also the scale. In the "olden days" you could self-select groups but it was mostly self-limiting as the granularity you could achieve. They were, after all, generally limited to physical proximity.

With the geographical requirement removed by modern technology the ability to coccoon yourself to a very narrow cocoon is amplified. In the entire Bay Area there are probably only a couple dozen people who would subscribe to my mix of atheism, skepticism, and libertarianism. But with modern technology I could (if I chose) essentially limit all of my "social" interactions to such people and also allow them to filter all of my interactions with those outside of that group.