One thing that really interests me is how living in urban centres distances ourselves from the social constraints that you would have in smaller groups.  For example: in a tribe of 100 people, if you do something antisocial like let your dog poop everywhere everyone else will treat you like garbage.  But in a large urban society, those societal pressures don’t really apply for better or for worse — the good or bad things you do that would be rewarded or punished in a smaller setting are just ignored.  If your dog poops on the sidewalk you just move on, and you don’t really have to worry ever seeing anyone again even if they give you a nasty look when you walk away.

This has a lot of implications, for example how small town people don’t like “big government” and large cities are usually full of liberals who regulate everything.  It just makes sense in the different contexts, because in the smaller towns there is a relatively greater chance that societal pressures will be able to accomplish things that big cities require rules and regulations to accomplish.  That’s obviously just one part of it, but I digress.

What adds to that discussion is an article I ran across from South Korea, where the internets are so pervasive that the societal pressures of small groups can sometimes even apply on a larger scale.  Read this IHT article and note especially the bottom paragraphs.  Even in (assumedly) a large city, the mob rule of the internet has transformed a large city into using negative social pressure to punish someone for letting their dog poop on the sidewalk — something that would have otherwise just been anonymous.

Regardless whether you think the reaction was overboard or not (I certainly do), it has interesting (to me) implications about what this means in our society.  Is this mob rule going to replace some of the rules that we enforce today?  Instead of a $500 fine for people not cleaning up after their dogs, maybe the parks should just post photographs of offenders on a blog somewhere to get better enforcement.  Okay, maybe not.  But nonetheless it has implications for the future.