Homesteading on the New Frontier (or Why I Decided to Write this Blog)
For those of us who grew up BEFORE the Internet and saw it happen, Howard Rheingold (who coined the phrase Homesteading on the virtual frontier) was one of our heroes. When I created this website, I decided that he would not mind if I took poetic license with his creation.
So why am I writing this blog?
A little history....
I spent the last 26 years working in downtown Manhattan and lived through the boom, the bust, and the reconstruction era (which seems interminable). Throughout this time, this part of town always had a certain energy and a pulse which you could feel. Somehow, though, that energy was generated by the lords of Wall Street and even though many of us worked along with these people, we did not feel that we were truly a part of that community.
All this changed in the late 1990s. After joining Polytechnic University, my home became 55 Broad Street which in the late 1990s was THE place to be. It was the center of activity in Silicon Alley. The entire building was populated by startups and universities. There was a festive atmosphere. It was boom time and there were lots of parties and plenty of money to burn so it seemed. We set up shop on the 13th floor (not being superstitious). Like everyone else, we had Ikea furniture and Herman Miller chairs.
But we did more than just buy the trappings which defined the community. We decided to contribute in our own very unique way. We set up our Executive Programs in Management of Technology and in Telecommunications and Information Management to educate working professionals and also set up the Institute for Technology and Enterprise (ITE) which was our R&D hub for the Department of Management. ITE was not so much a physical place as a virtual platform on which we could build a community and discuss issues that we thought were important. We had Round Tables and invited people from the community to talk about the transformation of large established industries as a result of digital innovations, the development of Open Source and whether the development of the New Media industry would mean that managers would have to change the way they managed. We wrote case studies about what was going on in The Alley and got our students in the Executive program to participate along with us.
The community flourished until 9/11 and then it seemed as if the bottom fell out. When the NASDAQ crashed in March 2000, things were bad but after 9/11, downtown was almost uninhabitable. Amid the devestation, we made a decision right after 9/11 not to move even though the University wanted us to move to a midtown location. We decided to remain part of the community and hoped that it would be revived in some way. We went to meetings to talk about what could be done for the 13,000 businesses that were part of the so-called frozen zone below Canal Street. We hosted a Round Table on Leading and Shaping the post-September 11 corporation and invited people from Morgan Stanley, Deloitte Touche, Cisco, and Deutsche Bank to talk about their experiences and make some predictions about the business world after 9/11. We documented what happened to our Executive program during and after 9/11 and how we responded to the tragedy. You can read about it in our article entitled Professors Remember which is in the My Articles section.
My barometer for the initial rebirth of the tech industry were the lunch places across the street from 55 Broad. Little by little, they became crowded during lunchtime as people who had retreated in the face of 9/11 started to return. Stone Street, a few blocks down from 55 Broad suddenly became packed with people who flocked to the restaurants and cafes that had opened there.The mood of our students (whom we call participants) became more upbeat. I sensed that Silicon Alley had not disappeared. This was not like the Tech Zone in San Francisco where people basically packed up and left in droves right after the crash. In New York, people don't leave so fast. They have a resiliency that enables them to stick it out.
The Alley is back but it is very different. The party atmosphere is gone and people are more serious. It is very much a grassroots kind of environment where people are eager to share their ideas and build a community again.
This blog is about the new Silicon Alley which is not an Alley at all or concentrated downtown. It is about the new new media industry: the players, the trends, the ideas, what makes it tick. To me, the new new media industry goes beyond what we think of traditional media - television, radio, music. What we are witnessing is a transformation of these traditional industries into hybrid product and services industries. We are also seeing the new new media seep into other industries such as healthcare where new technologies are being employed to transform how patients receive care. This blog will contain my impressions of what is going on and some of the issues I think are important for people to be talking about in the traditional media industries and the ones that are being transformed by media. Because of my unique position as a member of the community, I will also be discussing some of the ideas we have debated in my classroom and at Institute events. And I will share some of my insights from research I have done on social media companies and other small entrepreneurial organizations in the Alley as well as work I am doing on the healthcare industry.
As of this writing, I have migrated to Brooklyn where I continue to teach and conduct research. I miss 55 Broad Street which is a shadow of its former self. The vibrancy is gone along with the entrepreneurial companies that made it exciting and the universities that provide intellectual capital. But Brooklyn has come alive and I am enjoying what it has to offer.
Finally, I have decided that blogging is hard work and takes dedication and my hat goes off to everyone who does this every day. I will try to post a journal entry at least once a week.
I welcome your comments and ideas and look forward to getting some dialogue going on these issues.
Nina
