Explore "White Collar" by C. Wright Mills on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The rise of the big city has modified the prestige structure of modern society: it has greatly enlarged the social areas with reference to which prestige is claimed; it has split the individual from easily identifiable groups in which he might claim prestige and in which his claims might be acknowledged; it has given rise to many diverse, segregated areas in each of which the individual may advance claims; and it has made these areas impersonal. The prestige market of the big city is often a market of strangers, a milieu where contacts having relevance to prestige are often transitory and fleeting.
The neighbors of the small-town man know much of what is to be known about him. The metropolitan man is a temporary focus of heterogeneous circles of casual acquaintances, rather than a fixed center of a few well-known groups. So personal snoopiness is replaced by formal indifference; one has contacts, rather than relations, and these contacts are shorter-lived and more superficial. ‘The more people one knows the easier it becomes to replace them.'