The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
Byrne is pointing to a change in the American landscape where postindustrial work can be done anywhere, and so places like Virgil must invent completely new reasons for people to stay. As you may have already guessed, small towns will turn to services, mass consumption, and cultural amenities as a new source of both tax revenue and a reason for
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Both the intellectual history of authenticity and the recent scholarship on how authenticity behaves in media and tourism settings are indicative of an irredeemable system of striving and false hope.
David A. Banks • The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
The structural speculators at the helm of the growth machine are largely concerned with how well the city acts as a tradeable commodity (exchange value) and less interested in how it performs as a place to live (use value).
David A. Banks • The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
Under modernity, each person must be a piece in a jigsaw puzzle: completely unique but predictably so—a piece that is different from all those around it but still able to fit into a larger picture. We have more artifacts, both material and digital, than ever with which to enact our identities, yet we can never seem capable of staying unique for
... See moreDavid A. Banks • The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
Whereas authenticity peddling relies on the predictably unique, memes of place use very common symbols in unpredictable ways.
David A. Banks • The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
The second kind is constructive authenticity. It answers the question, Have I witnessed what I expected? We experience constructive authenticity when expectations set by media and advertising are fulfilled.
David A. Banks • The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
This shift from origins to style means that authenticity itself “becomes a tool of power.”
David A. Banks • The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
The value of direct monopoly rents works in degrees along a spectrum. If you sell a famous landmark, you’ll probably get a hefty chunk of change. Sell a house that is next to a nice park, and you will also see an increase in the price of the property, which is derived from your direct monopoly rent of being one of the few houses next to the park.
David A. Banks • The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
Since its beginning, the web has been a laboratory for identity formation.37 With the relative comfort of physical distance, digital networks can let us experiment with how we want to be perceived, what we want to be called, and how we present ourselves.