Beyond state law: everyday rules and the fragile public

Abstract

In modern urban life, people encounter strangers at every turn. How do they negotiate being thrown together into a society of strangers—to be among people they do not know and with whose cultures they are unfamiliar? Widespread acceptance of informal rules of daily behavior enables the acceptance of others—of strangers—as partners in everyday social and economic transactions. The term ‘public’ denotes a collective of people, linked loosely through acceptance of the primacy of these informal rules, shared concern for the general welfare, and a sense of which others are rightful members of this collective (and which not). Any public set of rules apportions respect in a society. It lays out who defers to whom, creating tensions between those respected and those not, between those included in the public and those excluded. In the United States in the period after World War II, a series of economic and social changes brought those tensions to a head and subverted the unity of the public.

Keywords:

• Public
• internet
• inequality
• civic
• mobility

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In academic terms, “Individuals and groups act, interact, reason, plan, and judge and have expectations of the future within a dominant interpretive backdrop that set the terms of interaction, defines a horizon of possibility, and provides the background knowledge of expectations, dispositions, skills, techniques, and rituals that are the basis for constituting practices, and their boundaries”; Adler, World Ordering, 20.

2 Kaplan, The Nation and the Promise of Friendship, 14.

3 Ibid., 32.

4 Varenne, Americans Together, 4.

5 Anzola, Barbrook-Johnson, and Cano, “Social Organization and Social Science.”

6 Lofland, The Public Realm.

7 Tilly discusses scripting. Interchangeable behavior depends on scripting, while improvisational behavior depends on “local knowledge.” “Scripts provide models for participation in particular classes of social relations, while local knowledge provides a means of giving variable content to those social relations”; Tilly, Durable Inequality, 53–62. In a society of strangers, passing encounters demand effective scripts.

8 Wexler, “Techniques of the Imaginary Nation,” 359.

9 “In the family, the particular is treated not as an instance of a universal idea but, rather, as a thing unto itself, something that actually defies generalization”; Steinberger, "Public and Private." Also, see Lofland where she distinguishes the public realm from the private (family) and parochial (friends) realms; Lofland, The Public Realm, 10. She writes, “Cities are homes to three sorts of social territories or ‘realms’ that bear varying relationships to one another…; these realms are mobile [and] fluid…” (p. 15).

10 On the concept of danger in American cities, see Merry, Urban Danger.

11 Kapuscinski, “City of Nomads,” 40.

12 Steinberger, “Public and Private,” 294.

13 Merry, Urban Danger, 125.

14 Ibid., 143–144.

15 Perin, Belonging in America, 17.

16 Lofland, A World of Strangers, x.

17 Bean and Leach, “A Critical Disjuncture?”

18 Ferrara, “World War II and African American.”

19 Reeves, “The End of Upward Mobility.”

20 Chetty et al, “Is the United States Still a Land of Opportunity?”; Chetty et al., . “The Fading American Dream.”

21 Carlson, “World War I.”

22 Friedman, Republic of Choice.

23 Hunter, Culture Wars; Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams.

24 Geiger, “A War for the Soul of America,” 195.

25 Bean et al., “Immigrant Job Quality and Mobility.”

26 Pikkety and Saez, “Income Inequality in the United States.”

27 Guvenen and Kapla, “Top Income Inequality in the 21st Century.”; Bunker, “U.S. Income Inequality Trends.”

28 Alba, “Continuities in Assimilation,” 1433.

29 Kelly, “Internet Promises to Lower Costs.”

30 Coombs, “The Internet as Potential Equalizer.”

31 Time Spent Playing World of Warcraft 2013, “Statista.”

32 Anderson and Jiang, “Teens’ Social Media Habits.”

33 Valentine, “5 Reasons Why Social Media Is Good for Us.”

34 Boxell, Gentzkow, and Shapiro, “Greater Internet Use is Not Associated with Faster Growth in Political Polarization.”

35 Eady et al., “How Many People Live in Political Bubbles on Social Media?”

36 Dubois and Blank, “The Echo Chamber is Overstated.”

37 Bail, Breaking the Social Media Prism.

38 Baughan et al., “Someone is Wrong on the Internet.”

39 Haidt, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.”

40 Ibid.

41 Ibid.

42 Newitz, “Opinion.”

43 Vaidhyanathan, Antisocial Media.

44 Marche, “How We Solved Fake News.”

45 Twenge, IGen.

46 Haidt, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.”

47 Suliveres, “Social Media.”

48 Edwards and Pye, “Debate: For and against Social Netwoking”; Pao and Taplin, “Should We Let Ourselves Be Anonymous Online.”

49 Haidt and Bail, “Social Media and Political Dysfunction.”

50 Bor and Petersen, “The Psychology of Online Political Hostility”; Baughan et al., “Someone is Wrong on the Internet.”

51 Migdal, “Mental Maps and Virtual Checkpoints.” Menand, “Thumbspeak.”

52 Menand, “Thumbspeak.”

53 Haberman, “Maggie Haberman: Why I Neded to Pull Back from Twitter.”

54 Sobieraj and Berry, “From Incivility to Outrage.”; Berry, The Outrage Industry.

55 Marchese, “An A.I. Pioneer.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joel S. Migdal

Joel S. Migdal is Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington where he was the Robert F. Philip professor of International Studies and the founding chair of the International Studies Program. Among his books are Strong Societies and Weak States; State in Society; Through the Lens of Israel; The Palestinian People: A History (with Baruch Kimmerling); and Shifting Sands: The United States in the Middle East.