Читать книгу Global Political Cities - Kent E. Calder - Страница 36

Between 2005 and 2014 alone, cross-border data flows increased by 4,500 percent.¹⁴ As those flows radically expanded, mobile communications spawned a new age of social media across a variety of platforms. Global issues were perceived and debated by mass publics in real time, accelerating the emergence of worldwide debates on issues ranging from apartheid and the Vietnam War to global warming, and centered on key global political cities.

Social media began with simple message and bulletin boards, LISTSERVs, online chat rooms, and instant messaging, sequentially emerging from the late 1970s through the 1990s. During the 1990s, content creation and social networks began advancing in earnest, with blogs, wikis, and Six Degrees—launched in 1997 and sometimes considered the first true social network.¹⁵ During the early 2000s, social media exploded onto a variety of platforms, including LinkedIn (2003), Facebook (2004), YouTube (2006), and Twitter (2007). Today, social media is largely divided into photo- and video-sharing platforms, including Instagram (2010), Pinterest (2010), Vine (2013), and TikTok (2016). Messaging platforms, such as WhatsApp (2011), Snapchat (2011), and LINE (2011), have also developed rapidly.

By sharply lowering transaction costs for communications and transportation, technological change has thus dramatically flattened and facilitated transnational interpersonal networks. In doing so, this warp-speed change has privileged subnational actors such as financiers and professional-services firms worldwide, but especially those based in large and diverse cities such as London and New York. Cosmopolitans are, after all, the people best placed to exploit the opportunities created by the death of distance, owing to connectivity across physically dispersed locations. Such opportunities have been especially pronounced and lucrative in the financial world, but market participants have needed vast quantities of timely information to capitalize on them.