Co-Creating Times Square
After a week+ in the apartment, I've been rarin' to get back to walking around town, so tonight I decided to set out for nowhere in particular.
I found myself drawn to Times Square. Yes, I know that as someone who lives here I'm supposed to say that the place is a soulless tourist trap where real New Yorkers don't set foot unless they work there, but the thing is, I actually like it. Not because I'm particularly partial to Toys 'R Us and Planet Hollywood--blah, actually--but because of what the place represents.
Times Square is what its visitors want New York to be--in a very real sense, they create it. The huge flashing ads, the supersize shops and restaurants, the indoor ferris wheel--go to the rest of the city, and you won't find that stuff there; if anything the norm in Manhattan is for space to be hypercompressed. But when people come to the City that's not what they expect to see--like its skyscrapers, their New York is a City of Marvels where everything is larger, louder, glitzier than anything they could find at home.
And so it exists.
This was driven home to me tonight as I was walking through the pedestrian island at the heart of Times Square. Cameras all around, taking pictures and videos of the surrounding scene that embodies the visitors' New York. It's classic memetic recursion--people are drawn to acquire and to distribute certain iconic images; the images that attract visitors multiply and grow; more people come to see and to acquire, leading to more replication.
The photographers think that they are capturing a souvenir image of New York, but that's the least interesting part of the story--they're actually making their own city with every shot. Take their cameras away and Times Square as they know it--their mythical New York--will disappear. It's not just McLuhan's predicted urban Disneyland; it's a simulacrum that's become as real as the real thing.
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