I had a few more points to make in last week’s column about diversity, but I ran out of space. It turns out that I should’ve tried to cram them in, since I received quite a few positive emails.
A quick recap: I said that a group of people with similar characteristics tends to produce stronger manifestations of those characteristics. Virtuous groups, I asserted, should be encouraged, in order to counteract the insidious effects of popular culture, yet our society does the opposite. In the name of diversity, it tries to tear down all group identity, regardless of benefits.
My main point: Diversity is over-rated, and it ought not to be artificially promoted. Just let it happen on its own.
I want to underscore that point this week by looking at diversity on the Internet.
The Internet is diversity. Anyone with a few dollars can start a website. Anyone with public library access can start a blog.
The result: An endless variety of websites, championing every religion, attitude, region, food, dance, celebrity, and nearly all other nouns in the world. There are elaborate sites (like CE). There are simple one-page sites.
You’d think the incredible array of diversity would make the diversity mongers happy.
It doesn’t.
I’ve heard two complaints:
1. Bloggers are disproportionately white and male. Keith Jenkins at the Washington Post lamented last year that blogging threatened minority gains in journalism. The “overwhelmingly white and male American blogosphere [might] return us to a day where the dialogue about issues was a predominantly white-only one.” Some people have even called for some sort of corrective action that would put minority and female bloggers in the top tier of popular bloggers. To the best of my knowledge, the endeavor never went any place, probably because the blogosphere is ruled by popular taste, not political correctness, and therefore such a forced tier is impossible.
2. All this diversity leads to a lack of diversity.
The second complaint and its paradox fascinate me.
The argument goes as follows: There are so many different websites, people latch onto sites that share their views and interests. The result: they never “branch out” into other areas to encounter other viewpoints and tastes.
I think the argument is mostly bogus.
Yes, the Internet allows users to entertain and feed a remarkably narrow field of interest. But the Internet’s mode of operation — its link system — also beckons us constantly to branch out. More than once, I’ve found myself reading a bizarre webpage and wondered, “How did I come to this oddity?” It’s kind of like a roaming conversation where someone finally exclaims, “How in the world did we get on that topic?”
Yet I tend to agree that all the diversity on the Internet can narrow our reading a bit. If you find something you like, you stick with it. Hence the widespread use of “bookmarks,” “favorites,” RSS feeds, web digests, and similar tools.
But I would argue that such a narrowing of interests is a good thing, for the same reasons emphasized last week: If we latch onto a good set of narrow interests, it’ll benefit us and society.
One of the best examples I can think of: Catholic Exchange and sites like it. I say this from experience.
I live in a lukewarm Catholic community. I know very few serious Catholics, and many of those few embrace a “Protestantized” version of Catholicism. When I attend a Catholic funeral, I hear things like “She’s in a better place now.” (Really? What about Purgatory?) When I mention beer drinking, they twitter like Baptists.
I don’t, in other words, live in a Catholic culture. As a result, I have a harder time keeping a Catholic perspective.
But the Catholic sites help. Nearly everyone on such sites is Catholic. Nearly everyone thinks like a Catholic. Nearly everyone is happy being Catholic.
These sites, in other words, give me a taste of Catholic culture. I realize it’s only a cyber-culture and hence woefully second rate.
But it’s the only Catholic culture I have, and I’m grateful for it.
© Copyright 2006 Catholic Exchange
Eric Scheske is an attorney, the Editor of The Daily Eudemon, a Contributing Editor of Godspy, and the former editor of Gilbert Magazine.
