But the plethora of new dances comes at a cost. It increases our fragmentation. It creates a barrier to entry for both veterans (who come and go at various points in their lives) and for newbies who have to “drink from a firehydrant” in order to become regulars. For veteran non-regulars it becomes daunting to come back and see so many dances they haven’t learned. Unless one attends regularly, one becomes a stranger in a strange land instead of feeling comfortable when “coming home.”
The article is about Israeli folk dancing, which I know interests me a lot more than my readers, so I won’t say “read the whole thing.” Instead, I want to talk about the general trends I see in the way people engage with their interests. You can become engaged with any number of interests, including your religion, a sport, a hobby, your profession, a charitable cause, etc.
I want to offer some observations that apply to the entire class of interests, and I will suggest that “matching technology” (Tyler Cowen’s term) plays a role in these trends. Then I will come back to Israeli Dancing.
My central claim here is that the nature of engagement has changed over the past fifty years, in these three ways:
1. Narrower. There are fewer people casually engaged.
2. Deeper. Those who are engaged are more committed and have deeper knowledge.
3. Older. For any interest that has been around for a long time, the demographics of those interested now skews older.
For example, consider the game of bridge. A social bridge game is four friends getting together in someone’s house to play. A bridge tournament is many strangers competing against one another in a large room. In high school and college, I played a lot of social bridge. In college, I also played some tournament bridge. I then stopped playing for decades.
Fifty years ago, I believe that there were more social bridge players than tournament players. Today, it is closer to the reverse.
When I tried to get back into tournament bridge a few years ago, I found that the “barrier to entry” had gotten much higher. Players expect you to know a plethora of new tactics, which in bridge are known as “conventions.”
The other point to notice was that the median age of players at the tournament seemed to be about 70. Not many young people are willing to get past the barrier to entry.
As another example, consider people with an interest in baseball. Fifty years ago, many casual fans knew the batting averages and home run totals of well-known players. Today, there are fewer fans with that knowledge. Instead, there is a relatively small group of fans whose knowledge includes arcane statistics that did not exist when I was growing up.
Also, I think that interest in baseball skews older, in spite of marketing efforts aimed at the young. My sense is that in the ballpark it is mostly people over age 50 who are paying close attention to the action on the field. The younger people are on their cell phones and/or watching the JumboTron.
I believe that religion is becoming narrower, deeper, and older. A smaller fraction of the population is affiliated with a place of worship, but there may be an uptick among those deeply committed, such as Orthodox Jews. Otherwise, many congregations are thinning out as their populations age and die off.
I suspect that what Tyler Cowen calls “matching technology” (the Internet) plays a big role. Instead of settling for a lowest-common-denominator activity, like a game of social bridge, you can find something that really excites you and connect with people who share your excitement. With better matching technology, the total number of viable interests goes up, and the share of people who settle for activities in which they are only moderately interested goes down.
“Matching” means that any given interest draws a narrower set of people. Those people are more committed, so that the interest becomes deeper, with a higher barrier to entry in terms of study and practice. Finally, as new interests emerge, the population engaged in traditional interests gets older.
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