Piece 3 full draft

The public space, and the shared experiences, within it have always been formed by individual people. Paul Goldberger, in 1999, claimed that technology was destroying our concept of public space. But is technology at fault? Interestingly, covers of The New Yorker do not reflect this particular attitude toward technology. Moreover, it seems that The New Yorker has had a contrasting attitude throughout the years. The New Yorker is more concerned with the educated individual as opposed to the sheepish public mass.

            Paul Goldberger claims that cell phones are the cause of public space becoming more private. Meaning that when someone is talking on a cell phone, they are less focused on where they are; their focus is pulled to place where the other person is. As he puts it: “It turns the boulevardier into a sequestered individual, the flaneur into a figure of privacy. And suddenly the meaning of the street as a public place has been hugely diminished”. Essentially, technology is removing us from the shared experiences of the public space. We experience places as a “kind of engagement with particulars” and cell phones are taking us out of this engagement. The “particulars” are the details; they are what make up the uniqueness of a place. Moreover, Goldberger asserts that this is causing a monoculture to emerge. This monoculture is ruining the uniqueness of places.

The New Yorker was created to be a cultural magazine with a more sophisticated sense of humor than magazines running at the time. Throughout its, now almost 90 year, run The New Yorker has strived to portray the culture of New York in its articles as well as in the cover art. However, early covers of The New Yorker had their focus on the individual not society as a whole.

 

This is the cover of the June 22, 1935 issue of The New Yorker. Here we see a young man who, presumably, just graduated from college and now faces the challenges of the future. The pink section of the cover exemplifies what can be considered as a successful life. The gray side represents a less affluent lifestyle. But, what are this man’s options? On the pink side, he is heading a meeting, he’s a diplomat, and he has people waiting on him. The pink side is the side of money and power. The gray side shows a life of hard work yet none of the occupations shown are in any technological industries. Moreover, the gray side has the man working a musician; suggesting that an occupation that involves creativity is a bad thing. While the majority of the American populous was concerned with the Great Depression, The New Yorker was more focused on the futures of the newly graduated. Intriguingly, this magazine, that claims to have its fingers on the proverbial pulse of New York, completely disregards one of the biggest economic catastrophes in modern American history. The New Yorker’s audience is the individual. It relies on the educated, lone reader because the public is made of individuals. The New Yorker puts the individual above the public and the public space. Part of Goldberger’s argument is about how, in the past, people moved together as a mass public entity experiencing the urban environment together. However, this cover would suggest the individual has always been at the center.

            The New Yorker, interestingly, seems to ignore major world events in exchange for focusing on the individual.

This is a cover from 1942. The world is in the grips of WW II, at this time. Here we see a soldier at the gunner position on a military plane. However, instead of being attentive and at the ready to engage in combat, the soldier is staring musingly at the full moon. Could this lack of focus be considered losing track of “the particulars”? If Goldberger’s argument is correct, is this soldier not participating in the public experience? Once again, The New Yorker chooses to focus on the individual and not the public space.  The New Yorker puts the individual, in this case literally, above the public experience. Its goal is to focus on the educated individual because that is who is reading their magazine. Looking at the pubic as one homogenized group is not the best way to understand the details that Goldberger insists that we are missing. The individuals are the “particulars”. They are the nitty-gritty details of a place. If Goldberger wants us to engage the “particulars” of a place, then we need look no further than the individual.

            However, The New Yorker has had groups on their covers. Yet, with this focus on a group, we still see the importance of the individual. 

This cover, from June 1988, presents us with a flock of birds. These birds all have what look to be Walk-mans, a portable cassette player. It would appear that the Goldbergerian nightmare of a privatized public has reached us before the introduction of cell phones. But notice that it is all the birds are different colors; they are all different form one another. But they are still together as a public. The individuals make up the public Goldberger would claim that they are missing out on the public experience by isolating themselves with technology. That is not the case. The New Yorker is portraying this technologically induced isolation as a unifying force. The birds are united by their technology. They are united by a common interest. Those individuals, those particulars, are coming together to form the public. Is that not how society works? Society is made of individuals who come together to form the lager public; there cannot be a public without the individuals.

            Individuals give a place its uniqueness. The New Yorker portrays this idea in their cover art by focusing on how important the individual is and by placing the individual above the public. Individuals are the trees that make up a beautiful forest. To argue that the lack of interactions between these trees makes them any less a forest, is wrong. Paul Goldberger wants us to think that technology draws us away from the public space and that we have lost our ability to participate in the public experience. However, as the covers of The New Yorker demonstrate, the focus should not be technology’s influence on the public, but rather the more integral individual.