Digital Gentrification

Article on digital gentrification, which I define as the digital corollary to neighborhood gentrification. Essentially, the cool factor that made a neighborhood hip declines as the artists and trendsetters leave the area as wealthier, conservative mainstreamers move in. I watched it happen most memorably in Seattle, where the Freemont district, once a haven of the avant garde, was transformed by a giant Adobe building that blighted the view of the waterfront and turned the demographic from young, unsettled artistic types to older yuppies wheeling their strollers up and down the sidewalks. Now Facebook is suffering the same fate as youth demos flee to Instagram and Snapchat and What's App to post--mostly because, in my view, Facebook is now inhabited by their entire family tree. It's become a family inbox. Good for numbers, bad for cultural cache.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/digital-gentrification-jason-hirthler