The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [86]
First, however, we need a vision—a sense of what to aim for.
The Mosaic of Subcultures
In 1975, architect Christopher Alexander and a team of colleagues began publishing a series of books that would change the face of urban planning, design, and programming. The most famous volume, A Pattern Language, is a guidebook that reads like a religious text. It’s filled with quotes and aphorisms and hand-drawn sketches, a bible guiding devotees toward a new way of thinking about the world.
The question that had consumed Alexander and his team during eight years of research was the question of why some places thrived and “worked” while others didn’t—why some cities and neighborhoods and houses flourished, while others were grim and desolate. The key, Alexander argued, was that design has to fit its literal and cultural context. And the best way to ensure that, they concluded, was to use a “pattern language,” a set of design specifications for human spaces.
Even for nonarchitects, the book is an entrancing read. There’s a pattern that describes the ideal nook for kids (the ceiling should be between 2 feet 6 inches and 4 feet high), and another for High Places “where you can look down and survey your world.” “Every society which is alive and whole,” Alexander wrote, “will have its own unique and distinct pattern language.”
Some of the book’s most intriguing sections illuminate the patterns that successful cities are built on. Alexander imagines two metropolises—the “heterogeneous city,” where people are mixed together irrespective of lifestyle and background, and the “city of ghettos,” where people are grouped together tightly by category. The heterogeneous city “seems rich,” Alexander writes, but “actually it dampens all significant variety, and arrests most of the possibilities for differentiation.” Though there’s a diverse mix of peoples and cultures, all of the parts of the city are diverse in the same way. Shaped by the lowest common cultural denominators, the city looks the same everywhere you go.
Meanwhile, in the city of ghettos, some people get trapped in the small world of a single subculture that doesn’t really represent who they are. Without connections and overlap between communities, subcultures that make up the city don’t evolve. As a result, the ghettos breed stagnation and intolerance.
But Alexander offers a third possibility: a happy medium between closed ghettos and the undifferentiated mass of the heterogeneous city. He called it the mosaic of subcultures. In order to achieve this kind of city, Alexander explains, designers should encourage neighborhoods with cultural character, “but though these subcultures must be sharp and distinct and separate, they must not be closed; they must be readily accessible to one another, so that a person can move easily from one to another, and can settle in the one which suits him best.” Alexander’s mosaic is based on two premises about human life: First, a person can only fully become him- or herself in a place where he or she “receives support for his idiosyncrasies from the people and values which surround him.” And second, as the quotation at the beginning of this chapter suggests, you have to see lots of ways of living in order to choose the best life for yourself. This is what the best cities do: They cultivate a vibrant array of cultures and allow their citizens to find their way to the neighborhoods and traditions in which they’re most at home.
Alexander was writing about cities, but what’s beautiful about A Pattern Language is that it can be applied to any space in which humans gather and live—including the Internet. Online communities and niches are important. They’re the places where new ideas and styles and themes and even languages get formed and tested. They’re the places where we can feel most at home. An Internet built like the heterogeneous city described by Alexander wouldn’t be a very pleasant place to be—a whirling chaos of facts and ideas and communications.