Is New York still the center of cultural activity in the modern world? Colleen Dilenschneider isn’t so sure.
On her blog, Dilenschneider writes about five ways in which social media is actually replacing NYC as the hub of creative development. You want the Cliff Notes version? Peep the Cliff Notes version:
1. Social Media can be accessed anywhere, connects you to anyone, and doesn’t require a super expensive closet sized apartment sandwiched between two crying babies.
2. Blog posts and online publications don’t (usually) pay. The impetus comes from an inclination to create symbolic capital. Before the advent of broadband social media, Dilenschneider argues that you needed NYC for these things. No longer.
3. Social media promotes weak ties, or connections with other artists we only know via the internet. Artists with more weak ties are more likely to “diffuse innovation” and be less susceptible to overarching artistic movements that can sometimes swallow up entire city neighborhoods.
4.C.D. argues that the gatekeepers are no longer the New York elite, but sites like Mashable and Stumble Upon that have the power to drive thousands of viewers to your site and get your work read.
5. Social media makes it so that any artist in any part of the world can add to the growing intellectual discussion. As that becomes more apparent, the desire to live in NYC will wane.
5 responses
call me back when it is possible to have a reasonably diverse and interesting cultural life in the average midwestern or floridan city in the united states. until then, no, there are only a few places that interesting people will want to live. either the few cities we’ve got, for people lovers, or picturesque places for nature lovers.
“Some of the key social and economic qualities that have made New York City so successful as a place for creative and cultural career development have been (and, I would guess, will continue to be) replaced by online social networks.”
I’m beginning to wonder if social media is the answer to every question asked.
It could be said that the “key social and economic qualities that have made New York City so successful as a place for creative and cultural career development” are being eradicated. But they have not been “replaced” – and certainly not by blogs, Twitter, Facebook, et cetera.
Why these formerly unique key NY qualities are being eliminated can be linked to economic factors and the priorities of the people who run the city and by those who are today still traveling from far and wide to live there – the modern, altogether-different transplanted New Yorkers, among other reasons. To say social media has replaced NYC as creative place is fantasy — the wishful thinking of people who don’t live in the city.
Let’s get this straight: nothing online can replace bricks and mortar, nor the vibrancy of a (real) metropolis, particularly one as energetic as New York, although many of the changes it’s undergone over the past twenty years or so are nothing to aspire to, for any city — big, small, Peoria.
I’ve thought something similar myself – not that social media will replace cities altogether in cultural importance, that’s silly, they are very different. One is a place where people live and the other is a platform for communication, and as long as we have bodies cities will exist, obviously. But I never have lived in a city and yet, because I can read conversations held by artists I respect at places like this website, I don’t feel too far out of the loop, like I’m not missing out on too much of what people are talking about.
I have a silly dream that the internet will allow small communities in the Midwest, Florida, etc. to organize themselves and become culturally vibrant. There are a lot of people who care about art and culture who simply do not want to move to large cities, and the internet helps us find each other, and maybe in the future those of us who are like minded will get together and take over some town in Michigan and make it flourish.
That’s just a dream though, and for now even while embracing social media we must be aware of the face-to-face physicality we lose by communicating entirely by computer screens.
translating sean: “i like social media, so i love cities.”
tell me how that is bad for cities?
It’s because of the internet that anyone knows my work at all, but the internet and real life are different things. They can benefit each other, but it’s good to see each other in person at least periodically.
Or to put it another way, the internet makes it easier to organize ourselves in physical places, either by creating a new community in a place that was previously thought to be lacking in culture, or to further enhance culture that’s already there.
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