conclusions
In a speech given at the Web 2.0 Conference and reprinted online, Clay Shirky (2008b) responded to the question “Where do people find the time to participate in social media?” Shirky explained that sites like Wikipedia or outside.in are smaller in scope than people realize, particularly when compared to the hours we spend as a culture watching TV. Shirky talks about the cognitive surplus (the amount of time people spend doing passive things like watching TV) and the shift from passive to active participation through social media's invitation to participate, or what Tim O'Reilly (2008) called the architecture of participation (n.p.), in sites and systems designed like Wikipedia for user contributions. At the heart of Shirky's argument is the concept of active contribution, of using the cognitive surplus to share one's experience, perhaps motivated by any number of things but mostly motivated by the simple fact that people can participate. Shirky points out that media consumption in the past 50 years or so has been just that: consumption. Social media and Internet projects are about consuming information, sure; they're about performing identities through consumption, yes, but they are also about production. Users contribute to reviews on yelp, use sites like outside.in and EveryBlock, and narrate their experiences on blogs because their location matters to them, because they want to give their favorite places an online presence. But they also contribute content because they have, quite simply, been invited to do so.
Technologies are becoming the tools with which we convey, broaden, deepen and construct collective identities through relationships to both people and places. 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, some of which I explain throughout this text, most significantly by creating web presences online for their geophysical location as a way to further construct and represent their collective identities.
Though some of the sites that excited me early in this research have changed dramatically in the past three years, I strongly believe that hyperlocalism is a fascinating trend that encourages and garners various levels of user participation and content. Ultimately, the hyperlocal trend should be more than people typing in their zip codes and receiving aggregated local content but rather contributing content in the form of stories, photos, videos, etc. Users want personalized content but they also want control over their media, control over the way their stories, locations, and neighborhoods are represented. They want in on the action. And in many ways, they see themselves as experts about their town's events, businesses, and politics, etc. One of the things I've been arguing throughout my research, and in some ways implicitly in this webtext, is that Web 2.0 technologies like social media create ways and spaces for users to inhabit not some fantastical, unreal version of their lives (although, some spaces allow for such play) but rather to extend their daily, typical lives into online presences through profiles, social network sites, and hyperlocal content as I've talked about in these posts.
On the practical level, I do not know how much the hyperlocal approach, the real-time capabilities, and the level of "citizen participation" is changing traditional “big” media. I know that newspapers and magazines are folding, and though much of the demise of this media has been blamed on the economy, perhaps, in reality, the economic downturn simply sped up the process. I do know that I have stopped reading the newspaper or watching television for my news. Instead, I read blogs and news stories online.
I'm not a journalist. I do not work "in the field." I am, however, a social media user. And I do contribute to sites like yelp as I research social media trends focusing on identity in individual and collective ways. When I see how many newspapers have online hyperlocal content, I know that traditional media content is evolving. At the very least, new media is opening up avenues for change, expanding narrative possibilities and providing readers with ways not to simply talk back or comment but to produce, create, contribute and participate. To write their stories. This, of course impacts not only how the story is told but also how it is read.
To some extent and even on some of the sites I've explored in this webtext, social media projects and news organizations still promote the consumption of information, but they also promote production, or as Alvin Toffler, McLuhan, and others have suggested, being a prosumer (a producer and consumer simultaneouly.) John Cage (1961) once said, "I have nothing to say and I am saying it and it is poetry" (p. 109). Well, today's reader/user/prosumer has something to sa,y and she is saying it and it is ______________________. Fill in the blank here. Users contribute to hyperlocal content because their location matters to them, because they want to give their favorite places, their neighborhoods, an online presence. But they also contribute content because they have something to say and they finally feel as though there is an audience interested in the same things, an audience listening to/reading their stories.
I do not mean to suggest that understanding social media participation or the hyperlocal trend is simple. As you can see from this webtext, social media is complex and layered, as are concepts of place, identity and community. Any of these topics I have examined could have and do have entire books, documentaries, and a great deal of scholarship devoted to them. What I hope I have done through this webtext is make some connections among the concepts of place, identity, and community as I have explored how, in composing hyperlocal content, users also compose identities, particularly a collective or community identity focused on geophysical locations and represented in digital spaces.
June