(Image: Paramount Pictures)
Gentlemen, let's say that you enter an elevator and find that a lady is present. Should you remove your hat, as you would in a home, or keep it on, as you would if you encountered her on a train?
That was one of many questions considered when elevators arrived in the United States during the 1860s. Leon Neyfakh recently published an article in the Boston Globe about the social history of elevators. He explains that as the car helped Americans expand horizontally, so did the elevator help the nation grow vertically. It also encouraged a new form of mingling between people of different social classes:
Its uniqueness as an environment also has allowed social scientists to use it as a fruitful laboratory for experiments on behavior. One study tested the effect of smiling on people’s willingness to stand near strangers, for instance, while another looked at how men and women choose to situate themselves in relation to each other upon boarding. The distinctiveness of elevators as social spaces is also the reason we speak of an “elevator pitch”—so named after the one place the company CEO might spend 60 seconds as captive audience to an ambitious intern.
For elevator fans like Bernard, Wilk, Gray, and Carrajat, this mixing of worlds is one of the main things that makes elevators so important. And the more opportunities modern life gives us to separate ourselves from others—by getting into our cars and escaping into our suburban homes, by hiding in our cubicles and burying our heads in our social networks—the more the elevator matters as a place that squeezes us together for a moment and forces us to grapple with one another’s existence.
-via Marginal Revolution
Comments (2)
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/27/nyregion/circular-logic-sure-they-re-fun-but-revolving-doors-also-have-a-higher-purpose.html
There are exceptions, but for the most part the tone of the comments reflect the tone of the article. An article that expresses ridicule and hate towards those who disagree with the author will get comments returning the sentiments.
I also think it might have something to do with context. I know that I have inadvertently almost started flame-wars because of a comment I have made, which was not understood in the way I meant it to be. Trying to explain my point of view without the other people understanding (or understanding that the original comment might have been said in jest; again, context) only fanned the flames larger, until I felt it necessary to just drop the whole conversation. Of course, there are people out there who say inflammatory things just to watch the ensuing coniption fits. I don't believe there are more of those types of people now (born troublemakers?), they just have a larger audience.
After thinking about it for a while I have come to the conclusion that the internet is probably the best thing that ever happened to humankind.
It isn't really fair to expect this, because the history of genocide, for instance, isn't taught in schools from brief, cursory mentions of events such as the Holocaust, and they are never put in any real historical context. But read historian Dr. Leon Litwack's work, for instance, if you want to know more about the unimaginable rage and hatred and violence that people are capable of inflicting on each other for no rational reason at all (*Been In the Storm So Long*, *Trouble In Mind*, *The Long Death Of Jim Crow.*)Actually, I would argue that if anything, expressing this kind of idiocy in internet posts might even keep people from the real violence they might otherwise commit.