Is society fragmenting?

San Francisco
In the June issue of Commentary, Terry Teachout wrote an article (Culture in the Age of Blogging) suggesting that blogging is fragmenting our society.

No Terry, our society is as cohesive as it ever was. I find that a home schooled 13 year old boy, from Boise Idaho, who has been isolated by his parents from everything in the mass culture, knows who Paris Hilton is, about her porn video and the latest Xbox game.

 

The demise of Life, Look, I Love Lucy and more recently the decline of Readers Digest are not viable measures of social cohesion. Americans still watch football, the World Series, election night, 4^th of July fireworks, see Star Wars, have Thanksgiving dinner together, eat McDonalds and drink Starbucks. We all wear the same kinds of shoes and look like identical robots to most foreigners.

There isn’t a shred of evidence of fragmentation. We are a bigger and more diverse society and that is the by-product of population growth, income growth and most of all a flourishing world of commerce.

The public always looks stupid en mass in surveys, but anyone who has been on a jury will testify to the commonality of values and moral cohesion of our society.