Ignore this:

There was a while when you couldn’t go to a party without having to listen, or even partake, in some kind of debate about the relative merits of the East Coast and the West Coast. Thankfully this obligation has for the most part disappeared. The times are less exuberant, the number of fresh-faced graduates moving to San Francisco or New York from the opposite side of the country has dropped off, and we are beginning to settle in wherever we found ourselves. Thankfully: the people who started these discussions were always the ones least qualified to comment on something as tentacled and slimy as regional culture.

Cultural analysis is tricky; it takes either genius-level insight into history and human needs (c.f. Studs Turkel) or a hard-won, personal knowledge of a single culture. Otherwise one tends to have a monolithic, static view of a beast that is fragmented, dynamic, and often violently resistant to casual inquiry.

The multitude of incomplete and facile explanations that can be generated for any cultural phenomenon may explain why cultural analysis is so attractive to amateurs. Including your correspondant, who does not have genius-level insight by any stretch of the imagination, and who has not really lived in any one place for very long.

In way of compensation for these failures, I confine my speculations to a single rampant misconception, and focus more on the methodology of cultural analysis rather than attempting to perform it outright.

The case in point: the general consensus is that Californians are friendly, and New Yorkers are rude. This may have been true in a very general sense at some point, perhaps as recently as the late nineties. But settled natives in either of these places will tell you that the tenor of interactions with strangers has shifted dramatically since then. Any number of causes are suggested for the shift, including the destruction of the World Trade Center towers, lower crime rates in New York, and overcrowding and failing infrastructure in the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas. There is no way to verify any of these claims, and what is more troubling, the system may have shifted because of purely internal causes. That is, the perception of California as a clean, friendly, livable place may have contributed most to the overcrowding that has raised pollution levels, aggravated tempers, and fostered distrust.

That is the temporal problem: culture is dynamic. Neither is it monolithic. The fragmentation of culture suggests a spatial coordinate, and indeed the best way to see cultural fragmentation is to move about. Only a fool would maintain that

The spatial problem, that culture is fragmented, ought to be manifestly clear to anyone who has driven

Indeed, now that all the facile comparisons have been made, the froth subsided, so to speak, it is especially tempting to take another look, this time with the hope of finding out what actually happened in the last five years.

myths:

Interactions with strangers in Northern California and New York. Natural environment. …

(*) assignment: come up with 10 unused descriptions of the DotComBust