The city is not a skyline, it’s a physical Facebook. Contrary to the beliefs of dystopians, both urban and digital life are deeply social in character, and city dwellers are creating a seamless existence between the two.
At the end of a nondescript Lower East Side alley, on the top floor of low-profile hipster hangout Freemans, Sarah sips her Hawkeye Sour as she checks in at the restaurant via Foursquare. Two seconds later, someone comments her update: ‘Hey, Sarah! Haven’t seen you since high school. I’m around the corner at The National. Swing by!’. At dawn, the two long lost comrades exit the club they visited after meeting up. During the night, Sarah’s friends bonded with her high school friend’s new acquaintances and vice versa. Some are American, others Chinese, Swedish and French. A single check-in was enough to spark more than twenty friendships.
‘Friends are the glue that binds cities together’ stated Aristotle in The Nicomachean Ethics. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, believes that friends are the glue that binds the Internet, hence the world, together. But when social media first made the big time it was believed that rural areas would benefit most. However, it is in the metropolis melting pot where social media reach their full potential.
People move to the city to be able to express themselves. To play. To find likeminded others. Social media enhances all three factors, becoming a key tool to achieve these wishes. Sarah checked in at Freemans to express her culinary and cultural preferences. She found likeminded others by going to The National and ended up playing with new friends.
Therefore it’s not surprising that certain studies suggest that Metropolitans are twice as likely to use Twitter as rural dwellers. Today more than half of city dwellers worldwide, or ‘Metropolitans’ as we call them, use social networking sites. On average, active users spend seven hours and 57 minutes on social media each week.
And Metropolitans do in fact have a larger social circle than people living in rural areas. This was established by sociologist Claude Fischer, who in his 1982 classic studyfound that the friendship-based social networks of those who moved from semi-rural areas to the urban core grew by forty percent. But when a social network rows, so does the demand to tend to the many intricate relationships.
In groups of chimpanzees, social grooming is performed by cleaning the fur of others. Our closest relatives in the animal kingdom spend twenty percent of their waking hours pampering each other. This activity is often limited to just two individuals. Humans groom in a more effective way. We communicate with many individuals at the same time through language, perhaps gossiping by the water cooler. Robin Dunbar, professor in evolutionary psychology at Oxford University, believes this is the reason why chimps live in groups of fifty, while humans tend to create collectives of 150 individuals.
In the city there are many more monkey backs to groom, and the rise of social media has created the means for us to groom our social acquaintances on a grander scale. This suits Metropolitans perfectly, who are often up to their ears in work or play, with no time to meet up with all contacts for coffee once a month. Thus, Metropolitans groom their friends on a digital basis not by picking, but by liking and commenting. Dunbar’s number of 150 may still reign supreme, but we are perhaps on the brink of a new social revolution where our networks truly expand due to the effects of urbanisation and digital life.
Of course, Metropolitans don’t only groom others. The city is the ideal arena to build on one’s personal image. In a small town, the local restaurant may be the only place for gastronomic recreation. Enter the city limits and you have a seemingly endless Zagat’s selection to wine and dine at. Metropolitans are well aware of what choices they make, and what to let others see of their edited life – a check-in at Freemans flies higher than at, say McDonald’s. These seemingly unimportant projections of where you go, who you rub shoulders with or even what you ate for breakfast – expressed through links, comments, likes, films and images – create a social digital beacon for other likeminded people to spot and ultimately join.
These digital connections sooner or later become analogue. Sarah, like most people who are active in social media, uses her online network to meet people offline. Four out of ten smartphone owners use social media via their mobile devices every day. The dawn of location based services such as Facebook Places, Gowalla and Foursquare, present in smartphones, allows Metropolitans to keep track of acquaintances in real time, leading to semi-spontaneous meet-ups face to face. Social media also solve the precarious urban problem of never meeting the same person twice. As Sarah’s friends woke up the next morning after their night out, all they had to do was go on Facebook to seek out the new acquaintances. Archetypal romance dramas where boy meets girl, boy loses girl and needs to find her again, are increasingly a thing of the past.
As the use of social media grows, a new map of the city is drawn on the borders between offline and online. Digital life and city life are no longer separate. They have become so intertwined that they not only mirror life on the other side of the Internet connection – they change and affect it. The image of the dystopian city with its population droning in the harsh light of computer screens is fading. Social media enhances the urbanity of urbanity, creating a people’s city – a living, breathing, onstantly updated city, which is being built post by post, check-in by check-in. Even Aristotle himself would be overwhelmed by all the glue binding modern Metropolitans together.
