Well, my post was supposed to be a joke. Obviously, I have to work on my delivery. ;-)
But, also fwiw, I totally reject this rhetoric. I don't think there's confusion between "village" and "world" trust at all, at least not in healthy people (which is, by definition, _most_ people). I DO think that trust relationships are occluded behind an impenetrable observational wall. And I also think that the fundamental ways trust is formed in the 1st world countries are rapidly changing... changing much faster than they ever have in the past. So, our antiquated methods for measuring trust relationships are at least partially, if not completely, invalid, nowadays. In fact, I'd even go so far as to speculate that trust is now _complex_ rather than simple. (Perhaps it was complex in the past, too; but our measurement tools were too coarse to respond to that complexity.) It's probably fractured into many different types of trust, probably dependent on the particular medium facilitating that particular trust relationship. Quoting Nicholas Thompson circa 09-11-24 10:17 AM: > FWIW, the evolutionary psychological take on this is that we are designed > to live in groiups of 40 to 60 or so. But human beings, in their more > recent evolutionary history, last milllion years or so, have been forced > into larger associations. But, as MacLuhan (?) pointed out, this has been > accomplished by granting to total strangers the same sorts of trust that we > properly grant to our village mates, creating situations in which poor > rural southerners defended slave owning with their lives and the > trailer-living tea-baggers defend the rights of the rich to make > unreasonable amounts of money . The concept of celebrity is just this > confusion between village and mass culture. The next step is to make > everybody a celebrity, and that, of course, is what facebook is about. > Whoopee! We can all have the experience of having strangers think they know > us. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org