Interesting thoughts from Nick Currie’s blog, playing off a Vito Acconci rant about the changing concepts of cities and locality: He proposes that being in the physical space of a city becomes less relevant when you can have all of the information and idea-resources at your fingertips with a computer.
“A computer makes a city seem almost unnecessary,” Acconci says. “If you can have all the information in front of you on a computer, do you need the actual city? The notions of a city now don’t seem as separate from notions of “suburb” and notions of “rural” as they used to. “City” is seen to be spreading… maybe a city starts to be more portable. If you can carry all the information from a city, does that mean you carry the city with you rather than you go into a city? Do you carry your own city, does each person now have the possibility of carrying a portable city rather than installing himself or herself in an actual city?”
Currie also questions what local really means. When it’s possible to create your own mix and match “bubble existence” out of whatever culture or mico-tribe you best fit in with (either online, or in a physical space), the notions of a cohesive local neighborhood culture begins to fall apart.
Because of globalisation, immigration, computers, your “local experience” can now consist entirely of foreigners. Most of my local business encounters in Neukolln are with Turks, most of my socialisation with Japanese. The cut-rate atomic German city I live in half the time has been cut-and-pasted, sliced and diced, filtered and fixed, almost as much as the bit-rate digital city I live in the other half.
and from the blog’s comments:
I feel like the music scene I’m part of is a lot more a “virtual” scene than one based in any city. Half of us spend the majority of their time on the road, but we all know each other and collaborate and play shows with each other and keep track of each other online. It’s exactly what the concept of a music scene has always been except without the common locality.
What does this mean for society if everyone starts living this kind of collage life? Although this distributed living can be good for the bubble culture itself, I’m wondering if it hurts the stability of the physical local culture?