The days of traditional Hollywood film studios may be dwindling. The dreams of movie stardom are shifting into the business of internet stardom. The vintage beach culture is becoming digitized. Los Angeles’s technology industry has been surfing the wave of Silicon Valley’s pop culture presence. The tech wealth in Southern California is quickly becoming vast, something which has already occurred in neighboring San Francisco.
Tech is now the industry in L.A. creating 2.6 percent of the workforce in the city of angels, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor. Companies such as Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Snapchat, and YouTube have set up offices there. These billion dollar companies have created a better local economy, as the median Venice home value increased by more than nine percent to about $1.6 million in just a year, according to Zillow. The seaside enclave of Venice Beach is getting bigger numbers now than any street performer ever could. The tech culture shock has produced a new sustainable image of L.A. communities.
Higher education has even adjusted their programs to match the shifting dynamics. Loyola Marymount University, also known as “the University of Silicon Beach,” has developed courses to learn about the new tech trend. Classes include developing video for the web, writing for internet television, video game design, and digital media entrepreneurship. “You have a lot of chip-level nerdy stuff in Silicon Valley, but what you have here is media, creativity, content creation,” said Timothy Law Snyder, president of the 9,300-student university. “We just got lucky. This is the neighbor we’ve been waiting for years,” he explained to Bloomberg.
The same process that had San Francisco swimming in tech dollars is now taking place in the bohemian beach community we know and love. Innovation industries now swamp L.A. and this new tech microcosm is a prediction of what the rest of the United States is turning into. Basically, if technology can make it in L.A. it can make it anywhere.
by Cole Conway
