Segregated interactions in urban and online spaces
On the one hand this seems to highlight the lived reality of many of us — moving from a segregated to more integrated neighborhoods brings its own set of issues.<p>In my case moving out of a middle class Black “food desert” into a more “diverse” neighborhood brought the stares of neighbors and disturbing and mentally, emotionally challenging micro-aggressions — how many times do you have to hear the same neighbors ask “Do you live around here?” before it starts to get to you? Ten years is a
long time to deal with persistent invisibility. Then there are policing patterns. In that context, the ability to find community on Twitter and FB provides some access to affirmation.<p>Black and Brown people in the US and Europe have been asking for generations to the groceries and other stores and services that the more privileged populations take for granted. In that sense the paper’s conclusions seem like old news. Proposals like the Paris 15 minute city proposal [1] might be one ray of hope.<p>It would have been nice for the paper to talk about segregation attributable to explicit and implicit state policies (e.g. state enforced segregation in the US, now outlawed but still visible in redlining practices today) vs cultural segregation (anybody watched Gentefied [2]?) other historic patterns. All that to say that there is probably a lot of important questions to resolve in how race, culture, ethnicity overlap when trying tease apart economic and online segregation.<p>Pentland also received a great deal of criticism in Shoshana Zuboff’s book Surveillance Capitalism [3]. The gist of her critique of Pentland’s social physics is that it amounts to a justification of behaviorist attempt at mass social control. Having heard a presentation of Pentland’s at a NetSci conference a few years ago, I didn’t think it that over arching, but still. I don’t know if people here had done much thinking about this. I can imagine a critique of this paper as being an attempt to control the behavior of segregated or marginalized communities.<p>I’m curious whether the data sets used are publicly available.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;2020&#x2F;feb&#x2F;07&#x2F;paris-mayor-unveils-15-minute-city-plan-in-re-election-campaign" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;world&#x2F;2020&#x2F;feb&#x2F;07&#x2F;paris-mayor-un...</a>
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.netflix.com&#x2F;Title&#x2F;80198208" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.netflix.com&#x2F;Title&#x2F;80198208</a>
[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Surveillance_capitalism" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Surveillance_capitalism</a>