Sociology

Observations from New York [Part 1]: Small Town to the Big City, a Sociological Perspective

Just last night, I returned from a four day trip to New York: my first visit to the City That Never Sleeps and I must say I found that nickname to be very descriptive of my trip there. My original purpose for going was to attend the Online Media Marketers Assoc. (OMMA) Social Conference on Monday but it evolved into a three-fold venture combining my work, leisure and passion as I spent my first two days with an old friend, a day at OMMA and my last at the Personal Democracy Forum. In order to really grasp it, I am going to post this in three parts: the first an sociological observation of the dynamic shifts I see from a small town to a large city; the insights, discussions and questions from OMMA Social; and finally a post for my impressions and hopes coming away from the Personal Democracy Forum.

First off, being someone who has spent his entire life in small, Midwestern towns of no more than a few thousand people, I have developed an incredible appreciation for the awe-inspiring majesty of the massive collections of human interaction, dependency and cohabitation that we have come to call ‘big cities’. I spent a decent portion of my younger years in towns throughout Minnesota and Iowa in which the grain elevator was very literally the tallest building for miles and the economics of filling that grain elevator every year ruled the societal and civic culture of the area.

It is frequently stereotyped to small towns that the notion of privacy is foolish, non-existent and all-in-all unimportant. Because after all, if everyone knows everything about all the other local denizens, what could ever sneak up on the community as to blind side it with harm? On one hand, it is very true that small towns allow you to know the names of everyone you see on a daily basis, who they are related to and what year they taught your mother geometry when she was in high school and that can be perceived as a sort of group-consciousness with no discernable internal borders. But contrary to this, the very existence of the stereotype of two housewives gossiping over the hedge is evidence that there is always a layer of privacy we attempt to create for ourselves, regardless of our placement.

So while the smallest of living communities offer the ability to create a hyper-connected database of personal information (all with out the use of a single online tool or computer), each family and person attempts to keep a small portion of themselves from the excoriating scrutiny of the public eye. But this personal database of group information becomes essentially useless once someone is removed from their community and placed in another social sphere which they know nothing about. It is like erasing the chalkboard with no Ctrl+Z fastkey to reverse the action.

I am currently living in the heart of St. Louis, the most populous city I have ever called home and I think that as a mid-sized city it has sort of eased me into the prospect of living a few million of my closest friends. I’ve begun to realize that people in the city form their own set of social interactions and of course have a sort of database of personal information which includes their friends and family but it offers only a small glimpse of the community as a whole. Rather than attempt to create a complete schematic and ecosystem understanding of the social contexts in which they live, people seem to be content to master their immediate circle and beyond that operate on a sort of wireframe understanding of other social contexts.

This enables people to be able to keep close their friends and efficiently navigate the social norms of other sections of their ‘ecosystem’. I call it an ecosystem rather than using some of the more favored terminology such as ‘class’ or ’strata’, because it may span classes, races and income levels but it is rather the sort of community and characters that a person may interact with in a given day. The groups of people you encounter on a daily basis in what I have previously called your daily ’social flow’ are your organic social network. From the homeless guy you see near the bus stop to the guy in the Italian suit who orders a double frappuccino in front of you at Starbucks every Sunday morning, these are the nodes of your wireframe ecosystem.

And for those people who live their lives in a large city, this is the most efficient method of navigating social contexts. It does not mean that they are any less socially engaged or motivated, only that the sheer volume of available social data drives people toward efficiency rather than complete conceptualization of their relationships. I have begun to realize that this has two primary benefits: first, it allows for easy extension into other adjacent ecosystems and second, it allows for the transportation of basic societal contexts to other cities and areas.

I say it is easily extendable because even if you leave your comfort zone in a city and you end up in the ‘wrong part of town’ or some other section of the societal structure which may not be encompassed by your own ecosystem, it is rather likely that you have at least encountered one subsection of your own system that is shared with this new one. If this is true, it provides a sort of reference point to relate back to as you venture into a new and different ecosystem. And then if you happen to find yourself in another city, it seems that despite colloquial differences and the subtlety of some norms, it would be relatively easy to find an ecosystem similar to your native one and adapt to its differences more easily than if you had been thrown head-first into a new social sphere with no reference point.

This may seem like quite a stretch from my usual theme of social media and internet ‘news’, but many people forget that at the end of the day, social media is an impostor. It is a shabby imitation of real-life social constructs that is intended to model your pre-existing ecosystem of family friends and coworkers through a new medium. While it provides an extension and a new forum for you to broaden your web of interaction as well as create all new connections you never would have otherwise had the chance to initiate, it all comes back to the real world somehow. You have to understand underlying social trends and interactions before you can ever hope to grasp internet-mediated interaction. After all, it is called ’social’ media for a reason.

The real reason I started thinking about this was the weekend I spent in New York. I flew in Friday night and spent almost all of the next 40 hours experiencing the city in a whirlwind fashion with my native-New Yorker friend Nick as a guide. We went from Times Square to the East Village to Coney Island to the Meatpacking district and back again a few times over, trying to be as un-touristy as possible while still getting a good feel for the city. Going there, I expected everyone to be self-serving, rude and generally uninterested in the rest of humanity (as is the stereotype for New Yorkers). What I got was something completely different. Everywhere we went, it seems like we made some sort of quick bond with another group or person over some sort of triviality of the moment. By the time we had spent 30 minutes waiting for the L train to Brooklyn with no train in site, I felt like the 150 other people waiting there were all members of my extended family all trapped in transit limbo. And on Sunday afternoon while watching the Italy/Spain soccer match at Nevada Smith’s we made fast friends with a small group of other people in our vicinity. People I had never met before but by the time we left, felt that we had been friends for months! And I decided that New Yorkers are not unfriendly or rude…and in fact they may more effectively navigate their massive expanse of a city than you can imagine. Given, this is all based upon my own experiences in my mid-sized city and a single extended weekend in a mega city, but I believe that I’ve developed a pretty good understanding of how things work (except suburbs…I don’t think they really qualify as either cities or small towns, they are really quite an enigma).

(By the way… this is officially my 100th post! And as a mild disclaimer.. I wrote it on a plane after 4 days of exhausting days with little sleep so if some areas are a little less clear than they should be…I apologize.)

Photo credits: midmophil and Arnold Pouteau

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