Book overview. This edited collection explores theoretical and practical questions about multimodal, digital production through lenses of rhetoric/composition, digital writing studies, English studies, and the humanities.
Abstract. As a term, hyperlocal can be applied to a number of new media technologies, GoogleMaps being the most utilized. This chapter explores how we, as social media users, compose ourselves through place narratives, narratives that take the form of hyperlocal content.
APA Citation: Ralston, Devon Fitzgerald. (2012). Where ya at? Composing identity through hyperlocal narratives. In Debra Journet, Cheryl E. Ball, & Ryan Trauman (Eds.), The new work of composing. Computers and Composition Digital Press/Utah State University Press. http://ccdigitalpress.org/nwc/chapters/ralston/
In a reputation economy, information about other users’ reputations spreads quickly so that if you violate other users’ trust, it will affect your reputation throughout entire networks of people. Whether it is conscious or not, those providing advice and generating other content for social media are getting something out of the process as they construct their collective identities.
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, most significantly creating web presences online for their geophysical location as a way to further construct and represent their collective identities.
When focusing on hyperlocal content, the relevance of the information becomes paramount in order to avoid what Steven Johnson (2007) called the “pothole paradox.” The idea is that the pothole in front of your home or apartment is a big deal to you, but your friends a few blocks over couldn’t care less.
The digital neighborhood, in the case of place bloggers, begins within a literal neighborhood and moves outward. And like many digital neighborhoods, place bloggers often focus on what journalists call hyperlocal content.
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 and our increasingly mobile society, we have made the concept of neighborhood into an icon, a holder of shared values. In doing so, a sense of nostalgia regarding neighborhoods emerges as we yearn for a place to connect with those who have something in common with us. Place easily becomes the focus of this yearning.
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