Page:TheCity.djvu/31

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HUMAN BEHAVIOR IN THE CITY ENVIRONMENT
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is smaller. In small communities there is a perfectly amazing amount of personal information afloat among the individuals who compose them.

The absence of this in the city is what, in large part, makes the city what it is.

Some of the questions that arise in regard to the nature and function of the newspaper and of publicity generally are:
What is news?
What are the methods and motives of the newspaper man? Are they those of an artist? a historian? or merely those of a brigand?
To what extent does the newspaper control and to what extent is it controlled by public sentiment?
What is a "fake" and why?
What is yellow journalism and why is it yellow?
What would be the effect of making the newspaper a municipal monopoly?
What is the difference between advertising and news?


IV. TEMPERAMENT AND THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT

Great cities have always been the melting-pots of races and of cultures. Out of the vivid and subtle interactions of which they have been the centers, there have come the newer breeds and the newer social types. The great cities of the United States, for example, have drawn from the isolation of their native villages great masses of the rural populations of Europe and America. Under the shock of the new contacts the latent energies of these primitive peoples have been released, and the subtler processes of interaction have brought into existence, not merely vocational, but temperamental types.

Mobilization of the individual man.—Transportation and communication have effected, among many other silent but far-reaching changes, what I have called the " mobilization of the individual man." They have multiplied the opportunities of the individual man for contact and for association with his fellows, but they have made these contacts and associations more transitory and less stable. A very large part of the populations of great cities, including those who make their homes in tenements and apartment houses, live much as people do in some great hotel, meeting