Abstract
The rise of social networking practices has inspired widespread public debate and scholarly attention: a growing share of social relations began to take place online in the virtual worlds of social media sites at the same time that the ‘real’ world became majority-urban. What are the implications of these trends for how we understand the geography of urban society? In this paper, we re-engage one of the foundational contributions of twentieth-century Chicago School sociology, Louis Wirth’s article “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” (1938) to understand the socio-spatial implications of social media in an era of planetary urbanization. A growing body of evidence suggests that central elements that Wirth saw as defining urbanism — the calculating instrumentalism of daily life, the paradox of individual isolation fueling the proliferation of voluntary associations and organizations, the “segmented selves” of complex divisions of labor — are being reproduced and reconfigured in socially networked lives. The centripetal social relations of the twentieth-century metropolis are overlaid by networking practices that mediate each urbanite’s blend of local, regional, national, and transnational social relations. The result is an intricate, evolving world system of socially and spatially segmented urban ways of life.
Recommended Citation
Zip, Larissa; Parker, Rebekah; and Wyly, Elvin
(2013)
"Facebook as a Way ofLife: Louis Wirth in theSocial Network,"
The Geographical Bulletin: Vol. 54:
Iss.
2, Article 2.
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/thegeographicalbulletin/vol54/iss2/2