Once upon a time (actually about 50 years ago) when I started doing research on social psychological differences between urban and rural people, many authorities dismissed the whole question as out of date. Sure, city-country cultural differences were once vast and important, but in the modern era of interstate highways, telephones, television, nationwide markets, and the like, such differences were gone or pretty soon would be.
Now, after a half-century more of those distance-shrinking changes plus the internet, cheap air travel, and so on, a Pew Research Center report has gotten media attention by highlighting notable differences in the cultural views of Americans according to whether they lived–or whether they said that they lived–in a city, a suburb, or a rural place. Add this report to the political polarization between city and country highlighted in the Trump victory–he won rural and small towns by about 25 points and lost cities over 50,000 by about the same–and it looks as if city-country differences are alive and well in the 21st century. …
So, let’s take another look. I’ll ask whether there really are place-based differences in cultural views today, whether they are diminishing as notions about modern technology suggest, and whether those differences really are about the places. CONT.
Claude Fischer