Quote of the Day

Americans are prone to drastically overestimating just how international they are. Average citizens may be dismayed to learn that most of their clothes are made in China and that their bottled water is shipped all the way from Fiji. They may be convinced that immigration is on the rise or feel like they get plenty of foreign news. Yet Zuckerman challenges the idea that the world has been flattened. Tariffs and subsidies distort supply chains, immigration regulations and patterns are deeply uneven, and the global flow of information across borders is constrained, primarily by our limited “interest and attention.” As a consequence, we exist in a state of “imaginary cosmopolitanism,” a condition fueled by a cognitive bias that exaggerates encounters with the unusual. Day-to-day homophily—the tendency of like to congregate with like—exerts a stronger influence over us than the desire for novelty or difference. In all aspects of our lives, off-line and on-, we compulsively and mostly unconsciously sort ourselves into groups and niches, reassuring cocoons from which we rarely venture.

- Review of the new book Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection by Ethan Zuckerman