One of most prominent features of hyper-local-something new blog TBD.com is the "Near You" widget, which allows you to filter your news by zipcode. Its default is 20005; I keep mine set to 20001, which is where I live. My boyfriend sets his to 20032, the zipcode for Congress Heights, which is where he teaches, and where all his students live.
Anyhoo so one fun social experiment is to flip back and forth between the news for "20001" and "20032." A few weeks ago, for example, the lead headline for 20001 was "CUPCAKE PLACE GIVING AWAY FREE CUPCAKES." In 20032, the lead headline was about a shooting that had taken place the previous day. I am not making this up. We are living in A Tale of Two Cities.
Ok so everyone knows that life is very different for white people living in 20001 and for black people living in 20032. White people, for example, are voting to reelect Fenty and black people are voting for Grey. White people care about cupcakes and black people care about the shooting that happened yesterday.
But why are we encouraging this? To me, something like a zipcode news filter ends up dividing a city even more than it already is. News outlets should inform people about the wider web of their communities – not just spoon feed them snippets of information about restaurants. While we’re at it, can we PUH-LEASE cool it with the food worship? I know white people are shallow, hedonistic, and childish, but seriously…. let’s grow up just a little bit and put the cupcakes away.
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