I believe I wrote about this subject before, though I can’t remember if it was for this class or not. I digress. I’ll start by quoting Wigley

“…in a paradoxical twist, [that] the latest technologies have expanded the body so far that they have shrunk the planet to the size of a village…The paradoxical rationale of the network is that the possibility of infinite extension actually produces density.”

And I’ll follow with Varnelis

“The transition toward network culture is not merely technological, it is deeply tied into societal changes…Steven Johnson suggests that the renewed interest in cities during the 1980’s and 1990’s will only increase with the growth of what Chris Anderson calls the long tail. Anderson observes that the demand curve for cultural products has traditionally been understood as validating the production of a small number of hits to be bought up by a vast consumer market. In his theory of the long tail, Anderson suggests that the Internet is making the flat part of the long tail-populated by products appealing to ever smaller niches-as profitable as the head. According to Anderson, tools such as aggregators and search engines couple with a societal shift in media consumption to the flat part of the long tail to inreasingly leave behind a one size fits all mentality for an interest in more eccentric, niche tastes. Johnson argues that with culture moving to the flat part of the long tail, the diversity of taste cultures that we can find in dense cities will appeal to us more and more.”

And it’s true! Look what’s happening here in Buffalo alone. Statistics are proving that our generation is moving back into the city from the horrible incarceration of the suburbs. And that young people are moving from less dense areas of western new york into the city of Buffalo proper (myself included). My conjecture aligns with Varnelis; that network society has conterintuitively made us long for smaller, denser environments like those proposed by the congress of new urbansim (which is a bit dangerous to say here and may be a touch inflammatory with their obsession with ‘neighborhoods’, but I’ll throw that out there). That the density of network culture provides so much availability of niche tastes that these things become ‘close’ through the net.

That culture has had a direct impact on our environment; literally compelling us to change our environment and restore our crumbling cities. The culture of the collective has returned in the city rather than the culture of the singular with their green grass and white picket fence. We want things close again, we want variability and niche shops in our habitats. What was sacrificed in suburbia, the internet has provided, and what surburbia sacrificed the city provides. Our culture has changed; the American dream has changed.

On another note, if you’ve never seen the serenitynow funeral attack in WoW, here it is. I remember when this happened (a horrifying 8 years ago). It was one of the first times the masses questioned our ideas of reality, but I’d need another post to talk about that one.