Facebook as a Way of Life: Louis Wirth in the Social Network

Abstract

INTRODUCTIONNot long ago, the number of Internet users on the planet surpassed 2.4 billion, the number of social media users exceeded 1.6 billion, and Facebook, Inc., completed the integration of its database of birthdays - billion and counting - with its firehose of other relational data in order to provide birthday gift recommendations optimized according to users' expressed preferences as observed through online activities of'friend' networks, corporate Tikes,' and various key- word mentions in postings and status updates (Facebook 2012; Radicad, 2012; Schemann 2012; Sengupta 2012). All of these trends have coincided with the long-anticipated arrival of truly global urbanism: sometime in 2007, the world crossed the fifty-percent threshold, and now majoriy of the world's lives in urban areas (Burdett and Sudjic 2007). Does the meaning of urbanism change when third of humaniy on the Internet, seventh on Facebook, and hundreds of millions more are on other social networking sites around the world? What are the implications when the world's most highly urbanized societies are now described by marketing firms as the places with the highest rates of Facebook population penetration (Figure 1)?In this paper, we analyze today's fastchanging world of networked urbanism by looking back to an earlier era of transformation that required new thinking - the Chicago School of sociology (Burgess and Bogue 1964; Harvey 2001; Phillips 2009; Sampson 2012). There now rich, expanding contemporary literature on the implications of social networking and the interrelations among localized, face-to-face activities and the social encounters taking 'place' on social networks (Lanier 2010; Gruzd et al. 2011; Takhteyev et al. 2012; Rainie and Wellman 2013). At the same time, the popular press - including the technology press - provides steady stream of anxious discourse on the behavioral consequences of digitally connected lives (Carr 2011; Marchie 2012; Marder et al. 2012; Partnoy 2012; Rosen 2012; Schmemann 2012) that curiously reminiscent of Simmel, Tonnies, Durkheim, Weber, Marx, and other classical theorists who struggled to make sense of the social consequences of the rapid industrialized urbanization of the late nineteenth century. Yet the middle generations between today's technosocial frontier and the 'classical' roots of sociology are now ignored, and indeed the entire Chicago School tradition that many triumphantly consider dead (Sampson 2012, 31). However, we argue that sociologist Louis Wirth (1897-1932), and in particular the magnificent (LeGates and Stout 2011, 96) developed in his landmark article Urbanism as Way of Life (Wirth 1938), can serve as valuable guide to contemporary conditions. When he declared that the ciy is the initiating and controlling center of economic, political, and cultural life that has drawn the most remote parts of the world into its orbit and woven diverse areas, peoples, and activities into cosmos, Wirth (1938, 2) gave voice to the kind of bold generalizations that had already made the Chicago School famous - and that would later lead critics to attack the approach as an obsolete modernism. Yet Wirth's synthesis clearly anticipated the urban facets of what Scott (2011) calls cognitive-cultural capitalism; other aspects of Wirth's theory illuminate the evolving world of networked individualism that Rainie and Wellman (2013) identify in the rise of social networking practices that are creating a new social operating system. Wirth worth re-reading, reconsidering, and re-thinking, because he gives us unique perspective on today's dizzying digital worlds.To explain how Wirth's thought in the 1930s relevant for today's world of social networking, we first examine how his views on urbanism developed. Then, we distill the essential elements of his theory that are relevant to contemporary circumstances. We then apply Wirth's theorization to analyze and interpret the implications of social networking practices for urbanism as way of life in world of expanding connectivity. …

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