The Unified Theory of Facebook De-Friending and the Urbanization of Tech

The dean of the Cornell NYC tech campus explains why “promiscuous friending” proceeded the Great Tech City Rush.

From left to right, The Atlantic’s Steve Clemons, Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, National University of Ireland professor Rob Kitchin, Cornell NYC Tech Campus dean Daniel Huttenlocher and Amazon Web Services’ Teresa Carlson.

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“San Francisco was Rome, and everything else feels like the colonies.”

That’s Caterina Fake, best known as co-founder of the photo sharing site Flickr, describing what it felt like to arrive in San Francisco in 2005 — “We grew out of Vancouver,” she explained — only to leave a few years later for New York City, to work with the craft site Etsy. “We were having a hard time finding engineering” in New York, she said Monday at CityLab, an ongoing event put on by The Atlantic, the Aspen Institute and Bloomberg Philanthropies.

If San Francisco and Silicon Valley remain the tech world’s center of gravity, New York City and other cities have inarguably lost some of their marginality over the ensuing years. One of Fake’s fellow panelists offered an intriguing theory on why that might be the case.

Daniel Huttenlocher, dean and vice provost of the Cornell NYC tech campus coming to Roosevelt Island, made the case that the Internet’s early days were marked by the belief that place no longer really mattered. By virtue of Stanford’s presence and an influx of government contracting money, Silicon Valley had a first mover’s advantage. But beyond that, it really didn’t matter if the person with whom you were spending time online lived across town or across the country. “It led to this very promiscuous sort of friending,” Huttenlocher said.

But in recent years, people have started to re-embrace the idea that there’s value in exchanging air space with the people with whom you engage online, at least occasionally. That’s certainly relevant to Huttenlocher as he goes about standing up a new school. MOOCs are all well and good, he said, but “when you’re looking at graduate-level education, things are still happening face to face.” As people reawaken to the value of that sort of offline basis to even online relationships, “what we’re seeing,” said Huttenlocher, “is this deep urbanization of tech.”

So there you have it. Your desire to prune your Facebook news feed helps explain one of the great economic and cultural shifts we’re seeing in the 21st century.

(Day Two of CityLab will be livestreamed here.)

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Nancy Scola is a Washington, DC-based journalist whose work tends to focus on the intersections of technology, politics, and public policy. Shortly after returning from Havana she started as a tech reporter at POLITICO.

Tags: shared citysocial mediasilicon valley

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