Jackson was constantly looking for a home that could replicate his own image – from the stage to the media to Neverland to his fans – an expansive playback system where his houses, gigs, and fans were simply devices in a wider process of reproduction. In order to analyse his urbanism, it is necessary to take into account not only the homes and cities in which he lived, but also the social fabric that is woven by a group of strangers – his fans – who suddenly become intimate when they share the same arena, mediated by their messages via cell phones, their dances, their hairstyles, their costumes, their following of channels (YouTube, Vimeo), websites, forums and social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat) in order to form a transitory, ephemeral, and intermittent (yet real and effective) community, which I call his urbanism. Following Jackson’s death, thousands of fans gathered in front of his family house in his hometown of Gary, Indiana 2 to upload selfies taken in his garden to their Instagram accounts. In front of the 672ft2, three-roomed bungalow, built in 1949 and located in a residential neighbourhood, Michael Jackson’s fans, posing as “moonwalkers”, changed the name of the street and the number of the house (2300 Jackson Street) to a new one: Michael Jackson’s Birthplace. His death provided the shared space of intimacy with an epicentre. With this gesture, they also changed the social media maps (in this case, Instagram’s geo-location system 3), determining the toponymy. Instead of 2300 Jackson Street, it is now Michael Jackson’s Birthplace. 4 But they also changed the image of the site. The street view is no longer a picture of an ordinary townhouse, an example of a suburb built to accommodate the employees of Gary Works (like Jackson’s father Joe Jackson), the steel mill operated by US Steel (United Steel Corporation) on the shore of Lake Michigan. With this gesture, fans created a shift in the representation of the urban fabric: instead of an image controlled by urban planners, the government or mass media, through the use of smartphones, his fans produced and circulated messages of their own making. 5 It was no longer a house silhouetted against the sky, but had become an entire society, with fans emulating ‘Jacko’s’ hairdos and gestures in front of the house, selfie sticks aloft. Their comments on social media – the millions of likes, filters and emojis – successfully changed the relationship between suburban dwellers and their environment or neighbourhood. The ‘traffic’ between the star and his fans, both analogically and digitally; between the different technologies that assembled them (social media, smartphones, tablets, emojis, memes, gifs, comments, likes, filters, hairdos, costumes, hashtags) have shaped a complex urbanism which is not The story of this house has been comprehensively described by Jordan Carver in: Carver, J., ‘Stopping by Michael’s House’, The Avery Review, http://www.averyreview.com/issues/11/ michael-s-house 3 Launched in 2010. 4 This information was gathered from Instagram in January, 2017. 5 More about this shift in: Castells, M., Communication Power, England, Oxford University Press, 2009. 2
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