Local Web 2.0
Description
Juan Martín Prada:
"The structure of participatory media contents based on spatial annotation point to interesting signs that practices which “spatialize” information hold intense “socializing” potential, given that they involve the development of reciprocal awareness between persons and their surroundings, often based on belonging to common spatial contexts.
The Web has started to channel the collective desire to know more about
the geographic spaces around us, the place where we live or that we pass
through, as well as the persons who live or can be found around us. That
desire has found one of its main sources of fulfilment in the participatory
technologies of the social web, which provides the basis of what is called
“local Web 2.0”. The significance of contextual knowledge is growing as the
new connected society is constituted, as well as the possibilities opened up
for developing a geographically localized collective memory.
The creation of these open maps includes geographic localization and its
technologies in the life of the community that inhabits those spaces and
places, and serves as a tool for activating specific types of communication
and socialization in the community. Thus, many geobrowsers are designed
specifically to create communities based on the physical proximity of their
users, who share a common environment. Among the most interesting
developments are the highly significant projects based on local wireless
networks managed by their users.
Actually, even in this new geographic phase of the Web, activated by new
geolocalization technologies, we are experiencing the lasting devaluation of
public physical space, the continuous de-urbanization of real space. It was
thought that this would be offset by the increasing urbanization of the
global and (falsely) trans-border space of the networks.
In addition, as a particularly active part of the interweaving of digital
production of sociality and coincidence in physical space, directly related
to the “live” experience of a place, it is worth pointing out the rise of
hyperlocal journalism, based on comments on news at the local community
level, of interest precisely because of its ties to its users’ everyday
environment. Closely related to this phenomenon, completely coinciding with
it in the majority of cases, is place blogging, that is, the activity of
blogs focused on events, news and people in a specific local area, such as a
neighbourhood or small town. Several aggregators and search engines for
place blogs have been put into operation, such as Outside.in, Place blogger
and Peuplade. They are proof of a growing interest in exploring the
socializing potentials inherent in the physical proximity of Web users and
in the information generated and shared by persons who live in the same
places.
There are many other emerging collective action practices, such as “Flash Mobs”, that consider their essential component or teleological culmination to be the congregation of persons in a particular place. This is yet another example of the increasingly forceful demand that the social should be built on the materiality of physical space, rather than being limited to the field of online interactions. Streets and squares should be reclaimed as communication media in and of themselves, reactivated as priority spaces for social interaction.
The set of artistic practices related to locative media (a term that can
be defined as the representation and experience of a place through digital
interfaces) can play an enormous role in the design of forms of social and
political dissention, especially though the design of alternative forms of
social and communicative interaction. The creative link between these new
technologies and mass public protest events that began around the Reclaim
the Streets movement are very promising. These critical practices are
certainly the clearest reflections of the new tensions between the global
and the local, the physical and the virtual."
(ICD mailing list, January 2009)