composing
identity
hyperlocal
devon f. ralston ph.d.
millikin university
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.
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.
our collective identities are in constant flux
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 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.
hyperlocal sites
outside.in
everyblock
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.
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
digital neighborhoods
(places/sites where 
people congregate) are
created in the place of physical ones.
Sources for information about 
a particular geophysical location,
its government, policies, restaurants,
and news increase due to user-generated
hyperlocal content and participation.
Nostalgia creates a desire to connect
to neighborhoods and communities long after they've changed.
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.
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.
Now, you just see condos
THE REST OF THE WEBTEXT
EXPANDS ON THE IDEAS, CONCEPTS AND PRACTICES INTRODUCED HERE.