men I'd like to talk to talking about a woman I'd love to know

Anthony Townsend and Andrew Blum recently "commiserated about the lack of dialogue between architects/urban designers and information technologists"

Blum references outside.in's Top Bloggiest Neighborhoods list in a piece written for a collection paying tribute to iconoclast urbanist Jane Jacobs, a critic of the 1950s urban renewal politics. Shaw, a gentrified D.C. neighborhood, earns the distinction. Blum too acknowledges that the communities appearing on the list are "gentrifying or recently gentrified". Yet, Blum falls short to probematize completely the effects of social media on changing communities.

But the other striking thing about the list was that all the neighborhoods were in a state of change—gentrifying or recently gentrified. It’s certainly demographic: a neat and obvious alignment of hipster and blogger. But it also means that the newly emerging character of these places is being forged, at least in part, online. These are incontrovertibly real-world neighborhoods, but their community is as virtual as it is physical. With each year, we get better at navigating between the two.

Those bloggy neighborhoods excepted, we’re not fully connected, neighbor to neighbor. But we’re connected enough, I think, that the payoff is becoming visible: in a community where common ties are electronically buttressed, we may be able to reap the global environmental benefit of high-density living without sacrificing the local ties of a medium-density neighborhood.

While not being "fully connected, neighbor to neighbor," Blum fails to recognize what voices are lost in communities as common ties are forged online as a result of inequality regarding internet access and/or realities regarding internet habits particular to certain populations. Perhaps social media has facilitated the a type of new-cyber-urbanism to which Jane Jacobs would certainly object. Richard Florida suggests such is the case, and references a conversation he had with Jane Jacobs:

I don't [think] Jacobs would be a fan - at all. On the one hand, she always brought us back to human beings. Technology would never, ever in her world be a substitute for human interaction. On the other, I don't think she was a great fan of these neighborhoods or what they are becoming. She liked "messy urbanism" - the diverse mix of people, buildings, and uses - of the sort she found on Hudson Street and later in Toronto's Annex and elsewhere around this city. When I asked her about gentrification she said essentially, "There are two kinds". The homogeneous, everything is the same kind, that's happening in many U.S. cities which, she thought, had gone way too far. Then there was "good gentrification." She used Toronto as an example of this - with its diverse mix of people and incomes, where young people fix up old houses next to working class folks and new immigrants, where new shops co-mingle with older hardware stories, butchers, delis, flowers shops and pubs. To drive this point home, she added one my all time favorite zingers: "You know, Richard," she said, "when a place gets boring even the rich people leave."

It is commonly maintained that the internet/social media proves to be the ultimate democratizer. The concept seems reasonable in the era of ubiquitous computing -- everybody has access to the personal computer, computing permeates parts of life never before penetrated digitally. In a sense, the internet could be styled as messy, a space for innumerable ideas originating from everywhere. Or is it?

The blogging community within some of the DC neighborhoods I monitor often generates conversation that seems to emerge by and large from the same locus. It seems to be informed by a pretty homogeneous perspective: young, urban, professional. It aids and abets the type of gentrification Jacobs believed to had gone "too far".

Returning to Blum, what is the true "visible payoff" if the community ties sustained (and forged, I would argue) electronically if not all are logged in? Exclusion & homogenization. I'm concerned about the lack of dialogue between urban designers, information technologists and people with limited access to information technology with roots in changing urban neighborhoods.