Composing Hyperlocal, Composing Identity by Devon Fitzgerald Ralston

hyperlocal

identity

devon f. ralston ph.d.

We are, "for better or for worse, different people in different places" (de Botton 12).

We create a sense of ourselves through locations, through places, and through elements which help create environments we physically occupy. We experience emotional connections to place(s) and to the people within them.

Today, our relationships with places are complicated and filtered by technologies, like GPS and mobile phones.

Users can be and often are in various physical locations throughout the day while they work, play and communicate online. We can be online from practically anywhere.

Jay David Bolter reminds us that “the World Wide Web permits us to construct our identities in and through the sites that we create as well as those that we visit" (“Identity” 17).

We share where we are and what we are doing on sites like Twitter, facebook and foursquare.

we geotag our flickr photos

Applications like fire eagle from Yahoo! and Google Latitude make it easy to store your location and share it with a number of applications and social media sites, making it easier to connect to people in your area.

we reside in online

and offline spaces, often simultaneously

The connections users make with one another in social media are typically based on proximity, either social or physical, because users are no longer residing in online spaces and then moving offline, but rather moving between the two in a myriad of ways.

Because people care

about the places they live, they actively seek out and compose information about these places and the communities of which they are a part.

hyperlocal sites

As users compose a web presence

online for their geophysical location,

they compose a collective identity.

newspapers go online

and invite readers to

post photos, videos, comments

and other content

Sources for information about

a particular geophysical location,

its government, policies, restaurants,

and news increase due to user-generated

hyperlocal content and participation.

HOWEVER

at its core, the hyperlocal movement isn't about

sharing one message to thousands of homes, but

rather about conversations, the kinds we get nostalgic about

as we text and facebook and tweet from behind our computer screens.

Nostalgia creates a desire to connect

to neighborhoods and communities long after they've changed.

digital neighborhoods

(places/sites where

people congregate) are

created in the place of physical ones.

As a metaphor, neighborhood evokes community, familiarity, shared space and often an assumption of shared values. Due to how easily and quickly groups emerge and dissolve via the Internet, we have made the neighborhood into an icon, a holder of shared values; we see community and collective identity as an outcome of the neighborhood. When the physical neighborhood changes, for whatever reason, a sense of nostalgia takes its place.

Hyperlocal content is an outlet

for such nostalgia because it

allows users to connect to

places they've been,

places they live,

and places they're going.

You can read more

about nostalgia, proximity, user generated content and how composing the hyperlocal means composing identity as you work your way through the webtext.

THIS SLIDESHOW HAS BEEN AN OVERVIEW

OF HOW AND WHY USERS CONTRIBUTE

HYPERLOCAL CONTENT.

THE REST OF THE WEBTEXT

EXPANDS ON THE IDEAS, CONCEPTS AND PRACTICES INTRODUCED HERE.

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