Over the last month I’ve been writing about the Future of Local Media over a series of posts (plus introduction). This was a process leading towards an article for the Talk About Local website, which I’m about to start work on. Before I do that I wanted to try and summarise everything in one place. Here are my notes.
- Radically lowered barriers to entry.
- Fundamentally this is human social activity like any other.
- Local websites look like trad media on surface but are fundamentally different.
What does “local” really mean online?
- A place is like any other subject. Interest in it will vary.
- Online communities of interest are similar to local communities of interest.
- Not everyone who lives in a place is interested in it.
- The local knowledge resource is like an iceberg. “tacit local knowledge” and “surfaced public local knowledge”. (D’Log)
- News as social currency. Awareness of resources and changes in community.
- The Media has never functioned effectively at a really local level.
- Word of mouth. System with high tollerance for failure. Powered by gossip.
- Fixing the “bowling alone” problem for certain generation.
- Viewing places through social graph.
- Viewing social through places graph?
- Moving away from lock-in of Facebook towards disposible of Grindr.
- Majority are lazy innovativers. Learn from social minorities.
- Blogging is empowering to the blogger.
- Platform for innovation.
- Tools for the inquisitive and experimental.
- Personal and business development.
- Augmented reality using data.
- Filtering reality. Again fits with normal human activity.
- Issues moving forward.
- Move away from hard data towards “sense of place” through complexity?
The gap between hobby and professional
- The middle ground. How to be bigger but not huge while staying afloat.
- Future of local media requires experimenting and not slavishly echoing old models.
I’m still not 100% sure what form my Talk About Local piece will take. It has to be accessible to “normal” people and attempt to influence the agenda for where local media might be encouraged to go in the next few years. I’ll be working through some ideas with Nicky at TaL tomorrow so before then, is there anything I’ve missed? Is there something above that you think is really important and should be emphasized?
I would really appreciate your thoughts.
Good clear summary, Pete. An idle thought on “‘Filtering places’: Move away from hard data towards “sense of place” through complexity?”. The lack of ‘local fit’ of hard data is often to do with its initial method/parameters of collection, rather than its later immaculate processing. One possible way of adding the complexity back in again would be to create place-based mash-ups that overlay wobbly official data sets with those intangible/tacit facets of a place that can never be collected as aggregated data. Find the creative possibilities that lie in the genuine meeting of ‘the state-collected and the locally-curated’, if you like. And to do so in a manner that goes far beyond the digital equivalent of the “pinning labels on a map” approach that is so beloved of state-sponsored agencies “engaging” with local communities during fly-by consultations.