The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
But then the City Authentic came to town and everything—from the buildings to the city government’s website—was reoriented to grab outsiders’ attention through the conspicuous deployment of authenticity peddling.
David A. Banks • The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
While there are some overt relationships between economic development professionals and the worlds of reality TV and online influencers, the reason all three professions have started to look the same is that they share a common goal: to provide a convincing story about authenticity to an increasingly cynical and savvy audience whose attention is di
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What we need are more unions, and those unions must be ideologically grounded in the belief that workers should democratically control a peaceful, human-centered economy.
David A. Banks • The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
Practically, they are also the only places that provide a decent assortment of options to try on. They also force us into cash economies because the scarcity of land makes it such that the necessities of life must be bought rather than made or grown on a homestead. Cities are, definitionally, social things.
David A. Banks • The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
Where to put the price tag or, to put it in a more academic way, where value is stored is one of the central quandaries in the City Authentic, a term I use not only to title this book but to describe a set of policies, practices, and ideas that leverage our modern desires for meaning and belonging to drive economic development.
David A. Banks • The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
To truly read as “authentic” according to internet studies scholar Crystal Abidin, influencers have to “actively juxtapose this stripped-down version of themselves against the median and normative self-presentations of glamour, to continually create and assign value to new markers—faults and flaws, failures and fiascos—to affirm the veracity of the
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The City Authentic renders neighborhoods and entire municipalities into brands consumable through not just purchasing or renting real estate but through the conspicuous sharing of artifacts and symbols on social media.
David A. Banks • The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
A legitimizing identity is directly related to a dominant force, usually the state. To identify as a “patriot,” with all its connotations, helps to legitimate the power of the state by indicating that there are people willing to die for its continued existence. A resistance identity also related to power but is usually forged in reaction to an inst
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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.