{"id":288,"date":"2012-02-05T16:16:43","date_gmt":"2012-02-05T16:16:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/?p=288"},"modified":"2024-05-28T08:14:41","modified_gmt":"2024-05-28T12:14:41","slug":"the-death-of-the-cyberflaneur","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/?p=288","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;The Death of the Cyberfl\u00e2neur&#8221; ?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2012\/02\/05\/opinion\/sunday\/the-death-of-the-cyberflaneur.html?hp=&amp;pagewanted=all\">The Death of the Cyberfl\u00e2neur &#8211; NYTimes.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Lots of good things to think about in this article. \u00a0However, as Mark Twain quipped once about a newspaper that said he had died, this particular &#8220;death&#8221; too may be somewhat exaggerated.<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">1. The author is overly romanticizing the flaneur figure\u2019s anonymity and independence.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">\u00a0 <\/span>Flaneurs like Baudelaire and Benjamin thrived in social networks and wrote articles about the powers of being invisible\u2014published ideas that the author has here condensed as a handy list re how properly to be a flaneur.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">2.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">\u00a0 <\/span>Are the social networks in which we function really primarily enforcers of \u201cgroup think\u201d conformity?<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">\u00a0 <\/span>Is that really what happens when we go to events with friends and discuss them afterwards, for instance?<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">\u00a0 <\/span>(Or comment on stuff our friends or friends of friends have posted.)<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">\u00a0 <\/span>Sure, it\u2019s one way networks can function, but this article creates extremes:<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">\u00a0 <\/span>romanticizing the flaneur\u2019s independence, condemning the crowd\u2019s conformity.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">3.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">\u00a0 <\/span>Benjamin\u2019s claim about the demise of the flaneur is really haunting, in part because it undoes this article\u2019s easy dichotomies. <span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">\u00a0<\/span><span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">\u00a0<\/span>Benjamin imagines a flaneur reduced to strolling the streets as a sandwichman, with ads on his front and back.<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">\u00a0 <\/span>Yet in the modern city couldn\u2019t such a job be the perfect disguise for a real flaneur and his plot of watching without others knowing he\u2019s doing so?<span style=\"mso-spacerun: yes;\">\u00a0 <\/span>Couldn\u2019t his hyper legibility in a consumer society (most people will see his ads, not him) heighten his ability to work invisibly?<\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/02\/sandwichman.jpeg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-290\" title=\"sandwichman\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/02\/sandwichman.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"186\" height=\"271\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Death of the Cyberfl\u00e2neur &#8211; NYTimes.com. Lots of good things to think about in this article. \u00a0However, as Mark Twain quipped once about a newspaper that said he had died, this particular &#8220;death&#8221; too may be somewhat exaggerated. 1. &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/?p=288\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,8,1],"tags":[32,33,31,34,35,38,37,36],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=288"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288\/revisions\/311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.swarthmore.edu\/pschmid1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}