Dividing our children into cohorts based on their age is fairly new to human civilisation. I mean, of course kids of similar age have most likely always enjoyed playing together, but today it’s an industrial-strength phenomenon: after seven or eight years of school-year stratification, any kid of 13 is likely to spend most of every day with other kids of almost exactly the same age, and not just in school but at leisure, too. Contrast this to earlier times, when children were likely to form groups that ranged across several years. Regrettably, I can’t quantify this difference with any helpful statistics, but I think contemporary representations of ordinary life – art, fiction, and the like – make it seem likely. From that evidence, it seems that it was common for children to be in groups with ages that ranged across a good decade or so, even as recently as the 1950s.

It isn’t just that schools stratify children by age, either. Families are smaller – kids have fewer siblings than before, and spend much less time with cousins and other relatives, who are often now quite remote relatives rather than close ones. Does it matter much? I think so.

Technology hardly helps

Billy Joel toured my town recently. I am not embarrassed to say that I’ve listened to the guy since I was a kid – the second ever concert I went to was when he did his The Bridge world tour, back in 1986 or 1987. One of my distinct memories is of a teenage party back in about 1990, when An Innocent Man was taken off the tape deck and something newer was put on, with the comment, “It’s better than this 10-year-old Billy Joel shit.” Which, you know, kind of offended me, although in retrospect it probably would have been cooler for me to be more receptive to new music. Anyway. Billy Joel just toured here, and I found the tickets a little too expensive so I didn’t go see him play. But I read some news coverage, and it led me to an interview he did back in 1997, with Musician magazine. He was asked about the music business as it was then, and said, “Record companies are scrambling to sign guys who can’t write, can’t sing, and can’t play.” The interviewer asked, “Are you saying that record labels are deliberately avoiding quality?” He replied:

It has nothing to do with quality. It has to do with radio formats, which are narrow-casted now and only separate us from each other. You either like heavy metal or soft rock, and suddenly I’m one of those soft rock guys, which to me sounds like soft cock.

That was in 1997. Admittedly, Billy was whining a little, and there might have been other reasons for a lack of airplay. But anyone can see that since then, nearly everything, nearly everywhere, has become more narrowcast than ever. We love the internet because it has enabled virtual communities that span the globe. Major (and indeed minor) news media has never been so narrowcast – whatever your political views may be – even if you’re a white supremacist or a deep red communist – you can find a news organisation that lets you hear the latest without being forced to endure a political slant you find unpalatable. You can have it twisted whichever way you like!

This kind of systematic division in society is now very noticeable, and it’s mentioned a lot – it’s easy to find articles about how the internet is a “two-edged sword”, enabling good people to form communities based around common interests, but also enabling terrorist groups, racists, or criminals to form their own less desirable social groups.

Narrowcasting breeds ignorance

Let’s turn back to those age-stratified kids. In any given bunch of 11-year-olds, one kid will, at best, know slightly more about any given topic than the others. On any point about which they know little, they have no hope of learning a darn thing from their peers. Children of diverse ages have things to learn from their older peers, provided they spend time with them – not just the sorts of things that we learn from schoolteachers, but appropriate behaviours, moral values, manners, and acceptable conduct. In the same way, those older peers can learn from adults, and it seems to me that spending time with adults is something that teenagers do much less of than they used to, as well.

What does this have to do with internet communities or narrowcast media? I think that much the same thing applies. Just as children need a little age diversity in their social circle to learn more effectively, we adults need to mix with a diverse range of people if we are to keep learning. It’s no good to move in circles that only reinforce what we already think, and that enable us to carefully avoid views that challenge our own. I’ve always found that when I listen to them, I can learn something from almost anybody, even those who are wrong about a lot of stuff.

Can we do anything about it?

During the recent presidential campaign, I found myself avoiding some news sites because they were starting to bug me. I read Salon less because it had such a pro-Clinton, anti-Obama bias during the Democratic primaries, and read Huffington Post instead. It reinforced my view that Obama was the better candidate. Perhaps needless to say, I didn’t spend much time on Fox News. I know that I am by no means alone in indulging my own biases in this way. And as far as our kids go, I can’t see age stratification being reversed any time soon.

But I can’t help thinking that these ever more entrenched divisions are a real problem that needs addressing. They are a little like industrial-scale farms, where huge areas are planted with monocultures, single crops that, through standardisation, enable certain valuable efficiencies, while also creating a risk of catastrophic failures. As we stratify ourselves more and more, we raise the risk that when we do encounter people with different views to our own, our different viewpoints will have become so entrenched that we face one another with complete incomprehension, and ever less common ground upon which to exchange information and build understanding.

Of course, I don’t really know how we can solve this problem – if it’s a real one and not just one I’ve imagined. I do think we owe it to ourselves, though, to try to build some diversity into our lives even when it grates a little. Perhaps instead of running our social lives like those monoculture farms, we could go organic – interspersing diverse plantings is a much more robust approach to agriculture, and it happens to be good for wildlife too!