My book, Mobile City: Emerging Media, Space, and Sociality in Contemporary Berlin, is coming out from Cornell University Press on January 15, 2025!
Mobile City tracks the rise of social media cosmopolitanism among an emerging creative class in early 2000s Berlin. At the time, many thought social media would make the world more globally connected and communication more democratic. As digital information became a key driver of the economy, an emerging class of creative knowledge workers flocked to urban cores in cities like New York and San Francisco. This transformation was especially dramatic in post-unification Berlin, where radical, underground spaces thrived in the re-unified city’s cosmopolitan (in German, Weltoffen – literally “world open”) ethos of openness and experimentation.
For many young people in Berlin, social media offered a new, hip space to connect with friends. Sites like Facebook became associated with cosmopolitan networks, for meeting EU foreigners and others in Berlin’s all-night techno clubs. For young Germans in particular, it was possible for the first time to express German identity in a cosmopolitan context that was hip and acceptable. But after the global recession of 2008, this vision of globalization and democratization began to crack. The European debt crisis undermined the cultural and economic project of Europeanization. In Berlin, housing costs kept rising and many art spaces lost their leases, to be replaced with high-end developments. Social media changed too: once a space for sharing updates with friends, sites like Facebook and Twitter became more polarized spaces to share news and political views. But just as there’s nothing inevitable about technology making the world smaller, technology does not have to lead to divisiveness and declining trust. These technologies are products of social relations that could be otherwise.
