- Aug 2022
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www.vox.com www.vox.com
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Sean Illing I do want to at least point to an apparent paradox here. As you’ve said, because of the internet, there are now more voices and more perspectives than ever before, and yet at the same time there’s a massive “herding effect,” as a result of which we have more people talking about fewer subjects. And that partly explains how you get millions of people converging on something like QAnon. Martin Gurri Yeah, and that’s very mysterious to me. I would not have expected that outcome. I thought we were headed to ever more dispersed information islands and that that would create a fragmentation in individual beliefs. But instead, I’ve noticed a trend toward conformism and a crystallizing of very few topics. Some of this is just an unwillingness to say certain things because you know if you said them, the internet was going to come after you. But I think Trump had a lot to do with it. The amount of attention he got was absolutely unprecedented. Everything was about him. People were either against him or for him, but he was always the subject. Then came the pandemic and he simply lost the capacity to absorb and manipulate attention. The pandemic just moved him completely off-kilter. He never recovered.
Martin Gurri holds that there's an emergent herding effect in the public conversation, driven by the internet, which leads us to have conversations clustered in relatively few different topics.
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- Apr 2017
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enst31501sp2017.courses.bucknell.edu enst31501sp2017.courses.bucknell.edu
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The lure of a reindeer herding community was simple: the economic independence of herding, which was inherent in the Nenet community’s cultural practices, would serve as a fascinating study on the interplay between the lifestyle of an indigenous community and the ability for external forces to disrupt that lifestyle.
The genesis of reindeer herding carries intimate ties to the development and cultural realization of reindeer herding, as well as provide context for its eventual economic utility. The extensive presence of reindeer in Arctic regions serves as an initial observation towards their significance: today, approximately 3 million wild reindeer and 2 million domesticated reindeer exist, many of whom serve as the foundation of various indigenous communities. Over time, the relationship between reindeer and people has resulted in a “social contract” (Vitebsky, 27). The process of a mutually beneficial relationship, where materials are provided to the human and a subsequent dependency on domestication by the reindeer arises, the reindeer-human bond is formed and culturally embraced. This resulted in the emergence of the centrality of practices by herding community around the reindeer, including the ability to ride reindeer for transportation and the utilization of furs and antlers for communal clothing and materials. In today’s environment, these practices serve as the backbone for economic trade and commercialization of reindeer products and delicacies.
For more information on the history of reindeer herding as a central economic practice, refer to chapter 1 of Reindeer People. For more information on economic development, read
Piers Vitebsky, Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia (London: Harper Collins Publishers, 2005).
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