[From Pixabay]
Good morning,
In his book, Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It, Azeem Azhar points to how today’s technologies are making it easier for us to bond with “people like us”, and why that can cause problems when it spirals out of control.
Azhar writes: “We’re often told that opposites attract, but in sociological terms that is verifiably false. One of the most common patterns in life is that we hang out with people like us. Whether it is because of socioeconomic status, ethnicity, a sports team or opinions, we tend to group with people who are more similar than dissimilar.
“There are good reasons for this trait, which is called ‘homophily’. Try sitting in the home stands of a football derby and supporting the visitors. Or working with people who have completely incompatible views with yours. Or making friends with people with whom you have nothing in common. Homophily makes life easier.
“But we have also long known that homophily shouldn’t be allowed to get out of control. An atomised society can lead to democratic sclerosis: the more divided we are, the harder it becomes to reach consensus decisions and govern effectively, and the less trust citizens have in political institutions. Eventually, homophily can lead to a kind of social breakdown—studies have uncovered that in some countries, including Turkey and the United States, people have a growing reluctance to live near other people who support different political parties…”
Azhar goes on to say that homophily itself is nothing new, but it’s different in today’s world.
He writes, “[homophily] has long been present in our lives—the first study on the process, from 1954, found that racial and religious groups tended to cluster together within housing developments. However, the technologies of the Exponential Age have made a common but formerly low-level feature of our social lives ubiquitous. It is built into the very logic of online networks.
“Consider the way people make friends online. Social networks endeavour to link us with people—the ‘people you may know’ who pop up on the side of your Facebook feed. These people are those with common traits: they went to the same university, or love the same soft rock band, or share your friends. As a consequence, social networks are more homophilous and clustered than the rest of society. And they are more cliquey, ultimately, for business reasons. People who are connected with like-minded people online seem to use social networks more. And groups with similar interests are more useful to advertisers: similar types of people tend to buy similar products, and that means they are easier to sell to. Thus there is a commercial incentive to group similar people into progressively more precise, and discrete, segments.”
Tell us about what you do to keep in touch with those “who are not like us”.
Legends aren’t born. They slog
“If God ever decided to sing, he’d choose Pt Bhimsen Joshi’s voice,” is how people on the classical music circuit have always felt and we concur. Most of us on the team grew up on a steady diet of Indian classical music and some of us were fortunate to listen to him live. Pt. Joshi’s voice could charge the atmosphere and everything felt electric. Few people know the backstory of the grit and slog that was invested. And Suanshu Khurana documented all of it in The Indian Express on Sunday.
“Sometime in the early ’60s, at a musical baithak in Calcutta’s Dixon Lane, in Pandit Jnan Prakash Ghosh’s living room, a bright and upcoming musician, Bhimsen Joshi, then in his early 40s, took his audience by surprise with his breath control during taans, immaculate hold over ragas, and near-breathless iterations of phrases. All this while his grip remained strong on the distinct imprint of the Kirana gharana, known for its impassioned renditions in the higher octaves. And yet, his was a different style, with shades from other gharanas infused as well. It was brilliant and yet unheard of until then.
“Sitting among his audience, engrossed in Joshi’s music and giving his daad (appreciation) in chaste Urdu at regular intervals, was the ageing Bengali actor-singer Pahari Sanyal. Sanyal was taken aback when, at the end of the performance, Joshi touched his feet, and, with a toothy smile, said: ‘I don’t think you’ve recognised me, saheb. I’m Joshi. I used to work in your house.’
“A stunned Sanyal was immediately transported 30 years ago, to his house on Raja Basant Roy Road, when he was at the peak of his career. A 12/13-year-old boy from Gadag in Karnataka’s Dharwad, whom he called ‘Joshi’, had been employed as a domestic worker at his home. Eager to learn music, he would sit in at Sanyal’s song rehearsals in the evenings.
“Later that day, after the baithak, once Joshi left, Sanyal turned to his friend Kumar Prasad Mukherji, commercial director of Coal India Limited and son of the well-known sociologist and economist DP Mukerji, and said, ‘Good lord!’ I can’t believe it is the same boy… He had a voice like a buffalo calf with a cold. I told him he had no future as a singer but I might be able to find him a petty job in the New Theatres Studio… he suddenly disappeared one day. Good heavens! How can this man be the same Bhimsen?’ wrote Mukherji in his book The Lost World of Hindustani Music.
“‘Since I had no earning, I’d ask around for food to eat or work as domestic help. Pahari Sanyal needed a servant… when he came to hear me at a music conference, I reminded him that I am the same ‘Joshi’ who worked in his house,’ Pt Bhimsen Joshi would recall years later.
Dig deeper
Ukraine as seen from Africa
To most observers outside Africa, the reticence on part of its leaders to condemn Putin and Russia at the UN appears puzzling. But their actions ought not to, argues Jean-Yves Ollivier, Chair of the Brazzaville Foundation, in Newsweek. This is because in the first instance, “Africa is not a country but a continent, and situations vary. That Eritrea, an entrenched dictatorship, voted in support of Russia doesn't say more about Africa than Belarus' vote tells us about Europe.”
Point well taken!
He then goes on to point out that “Africans are thus unlikely to have forgotten the highhanded manner in which Libya's Colonel Gaddafi was overthrown by the West in 2011, and the chaos left in the wake. Nor are they likely to ignore how many times since Africa's ‘independence,’ France has sent its troops into one of their capitals to replace a president fallen into disgrace in Paris—the last time, also in 2011, when French soldiers dislodged Laurent Gbagbo from his bunker in Abidjan and handed him over to rebels to make it look like ‘an African solution for an African problem.’”
There is an African proverb Ollivier thinks all of us will do well to remember: “When the elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.” This is something people on the continent take seriously.
Dig deeper
Tab dancing
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Team Founding Fuel
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