Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

Many of the shows are based on affinity or identity politics so the results are not terribly interesting.

Unsurprisingly a TV show based on affinity for Louisiana or affinity for LA will have by far the strongest signal be predictable affinity for either LA area. Likewise the identity politics, its very hard to express surprise that a TV show carefully engineered to appeal to black people, successfully sells to black people, therefore the map of viewers extremely strongly resembles a population map of black people.

If they had corrected for those effects THEN they would have had interesting data.

I did find it interesting that "deadliest catch" correlates more strongly with latitude than distance from the coasts. I've never watched, but I'd assume its mostly set on a boat?

I think the point is that the urban vs rural divide has not been the dominant conflict in America up until now. In the past other identity politics such as black and white or north vs south have dominated. Every state has rural and urban areas - why is it just now, in the early 2000s, that the urban vs rural cultural divide now dominates the cultural discourse?

Duck Dynasty and Modern Family is just one more symptom of the cultural divide. It's interesting because it's a small part of a much larger conflict with major political and economic implications that have already been felt (most obviously, the recent US election).

Also for me it's personally very interesting. I'm going to start watching shows that it would not have occured to me to watch, because it's one way to escape my own cultural bubble. Normally Duck Dynasty and Empire wouldn't be on my list, now they are - because it's a way to understand a culture that would normally be somewhat alien to me.

> I think the point is that the urban vs rural divide has not been the dominant conflict in America up until now

Given the Connecticut Compromise at the start of the union, urban vs rural have been a part of the USA since the beginning.

It was also basically the conflict that began the Civil War. The South was predominately agrarian/rural and the North was mostly industrial/urban.

As always, there is an XKCD that sends up this phenomenon: https://xkcd.com/1138/.

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