In a February 2, 2004 blog post entitled “Blogging Locally,” Simon St. Laurent imagines a middle landscape between blogs focusing on national and global topics and those centered on individuals:
I suspect the world has enough blogs where people comment on national and international politics, and know there are an ever-growing number of blogs on people’s own personal lives. Something in between those poles seems to me to be missing, though—blogs about particular places. Two months ago, partly to see if it could work, I started one focusing squarely on Dryden, New York.
In his first blog post two months earlier, St. Laurent describes beginning his blog being disappointed by the results of the 2003 local elections. Despite having invested time campaigning for the Democratic Party, Republicans won several important positions on the town board, earning them 5-0 majority. This setback caused him not just to reflect on the place where he lived, but to do so publicly in a blog:
The whole process has me thinking a lot harder about where I live and why, and a blog seems like the right place to do it. Thinking in public is kind of strange, and sometimes even embarrassing, but it also seems worth doing. There isn’t a whole lot out there on Dryden, and it’s taken us a few years to figure out where we are. Maybe this will help some folks find their way around, and heck, maybe it’ll be interesting generally. (“A Long Few Weeks”)
At the same time this local political event focuses St. Laurent’s attention to place, he realizes that his local newspaper is a poor source of local information. The larger newspaper from neighboring Ithaca covers Dryden but because its small size, Dryden only garners several stories each week (“Blogging Locally”). If he is to figure out where he’s at, it appears he will have to do it by finding and publishing information about Dryden on his own.
While the Ecotone group remediates such genres as the journal, the essay, and environmental non-fiction, St. Laurent’s approach points to another parallel strain of place blogging that draws on local journalism instead, offering a kind of “citizen journalism” that invites comparisons with traditional newspapers and genres of journalistic non-fiction. In this chapter I will examine two bloggers as case studies, Simon St. Laurent of Living in Dryden, whose blog focuses on the small town of Dryden in upstate New York, and Lisa Williams whose group blog H2otown is centered on Watertown, MA, a suburb of Boston. Like the Ecotone community, St. Laurent and Williams define place blogging in reaction to prevailing popularity of political blogging at the time. While the Ecotone group—what I call “essayistic place bloggers—tended to write about place but not for place, “journalistic” place bloggers tend to write both about a place and for an audience in that place. The aim of journalistic place blogging tends to put more emphasis on sharing local knowledge than on fostering a personal sense of place, especially as this knowledge can encourage members of a local audience to become more engaged in their place as citizens. Instead of constructing an audience of visitors and tourists, journalistic bloggers intentionally write for their neighbors, creating a flow of attention in which both bloggers and audiences are investing in the same place. While one could say these two strains of blogging share the same DNA, they have evolved under slightly different conditions and studying the variations that result offers insights into both genre formation and the construction of place.
Locating Political Discourse
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Simon St. Laurent (“People drive by”)
Like essayistic place bloggers, St. Laurent and Williams are trying to figure out where they are, and they turn to blogging as a way to do this. In his second post entitled “Where I’m at,” St. Laurent situates himself and his blog explicitly: “I live at 1259 Dryden Road, Ithaca, NY 14850.” In the next few days, he proceeds to work his way down the road near his house, systematically documenting his neighborhood by taking photographs house-by-house and posting them on his blog.
If you live in one of these houses and don’t like the picture, let me know. I’ll be happy to take a different picture or, if you feel your privacy has been invaded, take it down. If you have questions, please contact me.
I hope people find this interesting, and I’m hoping to carry on with it for a while. Historical societies and similar groups spend a lot of time trying to find pictures of buildings, especially labeled pictures of buildings. Maybe this will someday make their lives easier, at least for around here. (“Photos”)
Because these houses belong to his neighbors, he situates himself as an insider and constructs a local audience by expressing a sense of responsibility to them. This writing not only attempts to deepen his sense of place personally but also to create local knowledge that contributes to the collective identity of his place.
Initially he wonders if he will have enough material to post an entry every day, but within a few months St. Laurent realizes how much there is to know about Dryden. He begins to cultivate an audience of mostly local readers:
At this point it’s clear that there’s more than enough going on in Dryden for stories every day. There is an incredible amount happening here, and only a fraction of it can make the paper. Some of it is routine, but even in the routine there’s a depth I wouldn’t have guessed before.
It’s also clear that at least some people are interested in reading it. Traffic has increased slowly but consistently since I put the site up, and a good proportion of it seems to be local, not just driven by search engines or their spiders looking for new content. (“Six Months”)
As he continues to blog, he documents the details of community and political life in the Dryden area—updates on local meetings, legal notices, tax maps, and online resources relating to the area—increasingly finding more resources to draw on as he creates local knowledge for his audience.
Williams describes her self as “a stay-at-home mother with a very eccentric side project—a hyper-local newsblog,” a project that over time has helped earn her a reputation as an authority on citizen media. She began writing not as a “townie” but as a newcomer to Watertown who wanted to figure out where she was: “I didn’t start H2otown because I was a booster about it. I started it because I was an idiot about Watertown …What I lacked was the time to discover and think, so this was my method for getting connected to the place” (“Digging Deeper”). Williams depicts the scene of her blogging:
I didn’t know quite what to make of it, but I was delighted and obsessed by it, too. I saw 2AM a lot, still awake and adding stories to H2otown, sitting in the dark in a futon chair in my living room with my notebook computer in my lap while the TiVo showed replays of Town Council meetings recorded earlier off local access cable. (“If I Didn’t”)
Williams gathers her information from a variety of sources: 140 RSS feeds pulling in Watertown-related content, paper newsletters from Watertown organizations, local events and meetings she attends in person, and contributions from H2otown members. She freely admits her status as an amateur and often is self-deprecating about her news-gathering skills; at the same time she highlights how much she is able to cover by herself that newspapers cannot, suggesting how much ordinary bloggers can accomplish given enough time and enough willingness to learn.
When describing their motivations for place blogging, St. Laurent and Williams, resemble the Ecotone bloggers in that they attempt to define place blogging by pushing away from the political blogging of the time, particularly as it focused on national issues and was characterized by a strident, partisan ethos. As Fred First puts it, place blogging emerges as “niche” in the blogging world because it “allows the enthusiastic participation of a lot of thoughtful bloggers who, like myself, feel marginalized by the strident tone of the pervasive warblogs and its relatives” (“Running Discussion”). Similarly, Williams views placeblogs as a way to avoid “the type of polarizing discussion about politics, culture, and the economy that’s the product of journalism that happens at the 30,000 foot level” (“What’s a placeblog?”). The political conversations in Dryden were mostly about national issues because of the many challenging national and global events that dominated the headlines. St. Laurent also suggests that “the transient nature of a lot of residents” made it easier to focus on national politics, since they had less connection to local life and access to local information was less readily available. But St. Laurent expresses a desire to “step out of those conversations” because “they often combine intense polarization with a sense that there isn’t much for (most) individuals to do about them” (“Why I’m not”).
These sentiments must be seen in the context of broader hopes that the internet could usher in a new era of civic discourse, one not dictated by the mainstream media or partisan divides of the past but driven by egalitarian grassroots participation by ordinary people. Matt Welch, in his article “Farewell to Warblogging,” recounts coining the term “warblogging” to describe the outpouring of citizen-driven media in response to the September 2001 attacks. For a short time, he experienced blogging as a grassroots movement characterized by critical thinking, humor, an aversion to the culture wars, and generous non-partisanship. But these halcyon days proved to be short-lived as the debates around the response to 9/11, the war in Iraq, and the 2004 election soon fractured along party lines. Welch observes that the 2000 election was described by experts as the most partisan in history, but after 9/11 polls showed that the polarization between Republicans and Democrats had already increased. As he looks back at 2001, he confesses that he “can’t shake the feeling of nostalgia for a promising cross-partisan moment that just fizzled away. Americans are always much more interesting than their political parties or ideological labels, and for a few months there it was possible for readers and writers alike to feel the unfamiliar slap of collisions with worlds they’d previously sealed off from themselves.”
Welch’s sentiments would appear to confirm what legal scholar Cass Sunstein asserts in Republic.com 2.0, that the internet could actually be undermining democracy by making it easy for people to cordon themselves off from views they disagree with and cluster more tightly with those who share their ideas, creating an “echo chamber” effect. In a 2008 discussion with Yochai Benkler of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Sunstein cites research that suggest when groups of people who share similar views get together, their discussions tend to encourage more extreme positions than they would normally have taken. In his view, the ability to filter the web in a personalized way creates fragmentation and isolation rather than exposing people to views they normally wouldn’t encounter. To counter this tendency, the web needs to be designed in the way Jane Jacobs argued healthy cities are designed—to encourage serendipitous interactions with people who are different from us. Yochai Benkler counters that the tendency to talk to people who agree with us is a natural way for humans to interact, and that we should not fault the internet for failing to cure us of this. Instead, we should contrast the web with traditional media and recognize the ways that the web creates greater opportunities for ordinary individuals and groups to set the media agenda, deciding for themselves what information they want to consume and how they want to organize themselves. In his view, the mass media produces passive consumers while the internet creates more possibilities for users to both consume and produce information (“Our World Digitized”).
Journalistic place bloggers appear to share Welch’s and Sunstein’s concerns regarding the polarizing tendencies of online public discourse while also sharing Benchler’s more sanguine approach. For St. Laurent and Williams, the solution is not to reject blogging about politics, but to ground political discussion in the local. As support, St. Laurent cites no less than the godfather of warblogging, Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, one of the most well-known political blogs. In an early 2004 post entitled “Blogging: the Next Wave,” Reynolds advocated for a turn to local politics in blogging. In Reynolds view, local politics are under-covered because the topic is considered less interesting than national or international news, and local papers are often understaffed and lack the resources to cover news that the average local resident would like to read. Reynolds argues that local bloggers can step in to fill this gap by covering local events, not just “opining” but actually gathering information from town meetings and public records and even posting original photographs and video when possible. Reynolds also opens the door for the non-political to get involved: “If politics isn’t your interest, local blogs focusing on the music scene, restaurants, or retail can do just as well.” While Reynolds assumes that upcoming 2004 presidential elections would keep warblogs and conventional political blogging in the spotlight into the fall, he predicts that over the long term blogs focused on other areas will have the most potential for growth and for affecting the world on a day to day basis” (Reynolds).
Calling All Local Bloggers
St. Laurent does not see much evidence that people have begun blogging locally, but he wonders if he is not looking hard enough. In an April 19, 2004 post on the O’Reilly blog, “Looking for locally-focused weblogs,” he puts out a call for anyone else who might be blogging about place: “While weblogs’ ability to connect people regardless of their geographic location has produced some fascinating stuff, I’m looking for weblogs that focus squarely on a particular area.” Simon defines what he has in mind:
My criteria are fairly simple. The weblog should focus primarily on local politics, where local is something smaller, preferably much smaller, than a county, state, or province. I don’t mind pointing to subcategories of weblogs with broader perspectives, so long as what I’m pointing to is mostly local. Local weblogs can be from any country, not just the US, though that’s what I’ve listed so far. They don’t have to be in English, and they don’t have to focus on politics, either.
By first suggesting that place blogging should focus on local politics, St. Laurent aligns place blogging closely with journalism as a genre, but he also quickly loosens the definition to include blogs that include content on other topics and which might not discuss politics at all. (“Looking”)
St. Laurent compiles a modest list and eventually provides a link to another list being created at the Personal Democracy Forum which would have about 500 blogs on its list by 2008 (“All Blogotics”). On January 1, 2005, Micah Silfry posts a similar call for local blogging:
If 2004 was the Year of the Big Nationally-Influential Political Blogs, could 2005 be the year that blogs that focus on state and local politics come into their own? And I mean blogs written by passionate amateurs, not the “Politics1[stateabbreviation].com” sites that are useful aggregators of local political news, but gathering places for conversation and debate influencing the local political and journalistic scene. (“Silfry”)
Like St. Laurent, Silfry suggest that political blogging on a national level had run its course and he proposes local blogging as an alternative to the prevailing blogging practices.
Collecting lists of placeblogs would appear to be a common impulse among those interested in place blogging. On August 1, 2006, Williams announced on her blog that she bet Jay Rosen of Pressthink that she could find “1,000 local newsblogs—placeblogs—in the U.S.” Williams defines place bloggers in way similar to St. Laurent:
Placeblogs are weblogs written about a geographical area: a town, a city, a county. They’re a running log of what’s happening there; they’re not newspapers, although they may contain “random acts of journalism”; they’re about the lived experience of a place. (“The Thousand”)
Like the Ecotone group, Williams turns to natural metaphors to describe placeblogs. In a talk on place blogging at the “Citizen Journalism Unconference 2006,” she describes herself as a “web botanist” and she proposes a “natural history of placeblogs” describing the conditions that have made the emergence of place blogs possible and the demographic qualities that indicate the kinds of communities “most likely to sprout a placeblog” (“Placeblogs”). To convey what she sees as the bottom-up, user-generated nature of place blogs in contrast to traditional news media, she characterizes place blogs as “a weedy, hardy species, growing and surviving in the places you’d least expect” (“The Thousand”). She also stresses the uniqueness and authentic voice represented in these blogs:
And the other thing I want to tell you is that so many of them are absolutely delightful—funny, sharp, unique. This is not the voice of the America that has been made bland and generic by the spread of chain stores and identical bendervilles; in these blogs, the specific, uncopyable, indestructable personality of communities in the US is still in there, like a pilot light in an unlit stove. (“8/9/2006”)
Place blogs are depicted as an antidote to homogenizing forces that would undermine the authenticity of place, as springing “from a fiercely non-generic America that’s not about big-box retailers.” In her mind, the pleasure of place blogging is “the pleasure of being able to produce something from beginning to end, rare in our modern industrialized world where most of us are a small part of a large machine; the joy of craftsmanship that comes from being allowed to stick at something long enough to get better over time.” Williams is motivated to create this list because she feels that the examples of “citizen journalism” and “hyperlocal blogging” offered by the media tend to obscure the uniqueness of placeblogs by pointing to the same well-known examples over and over, which she feels is unfair to the hundreds, if not thousands of place blogs that she believes exist all over the country. Eventually she receives a grant to design what she hopes will be the first and largest directory of place blogs, a site called placeblogger.com that is launched in January 2007.
While both St. Laurent and Williams point to problems with their local newspapers as part of the reason they begin blogging, they make it clear that they think local blogging necessarily competes directly with traditional newspaper organizations. A long-standing “journalism vs. blogging” debate has remained persistent despite repeated attempts to put it to rest (Rosen, “Bloggers vs Journalists”). Critics of “citizen journalism” and blogging often portray these newer forms as rivals to mainstream media that seeks to create “journalism without journalists,” producing news without the standards or training that defines professional journalism as result. While the term “citizen journalism” has been useful as a way to highlight the ground-up nature of hyperlocal blogging, Williams recognizes it is risky to use because it “focuses any comparison between weblogs and newspapers on what newspapers do well.” As Williams puts it, “to look at what I like to call placeblogs as bad newspapers is a bit like looking at a cat and saying it’s a lousy dog because it doesn’t fetch” (“I do all”). If places blogs are “fusions of news and schmooze,” as Jan Schaffer puts it, then unfairly accuse hyperlocal sites as pushing schmooze as news (8). Williams argues that place blogging is often dismissed as being “minor,” but to criticize place blogging this way is to fundamentally misunderstand it goals and its strengths as a genre (“Placeblogs” 8:39).
When defining placeblogs and how they relate to traditional journalism, Williams is quick to underplay the comparison with traditional “news” and insists that place blogs are define precisely by the content that would not make the local paper. While there might be some overlap between place blogging and newspaper content, it may not necessarily be very much. As Williams puts it, “A lot of the attention of a placeblog will be simply on things that would not never make the newspaper” and, in fact, it is exactly this “minor” content that might qualify more directly as “news.” In reference to H2otown, she argues it would cease to exist with out such content: “If you took out the part about pizza crusts or personality then nobody would go to the site, you’d kill it.” Consequently, she feels called to defend the ordinariness of such content on the grounds that it is “important to the people who live there, that’s part of their conversation that they’re having about their place” (“Placeblogs” 9:15-9:35). Sheldon Rampton, editor of PR Watch, observes that such content did not always fall outside the purview of the local newspaper. Before the 1950s, it was common for local newspapers to feature news like, “Mr. and Mrs. Joe Green went to Chicago to visit their daughter-in-law. They had a nice visit” (“Placeblogs” 28:00). While Williams acknowledges that some traditionalist journalists find such “country correspondence” tedious (she cites one recent commenter who described it as “gargling barbed wire”), she argues that what matters is that such information is valuable to the people who read those papers. For this reason, place blogging can be seen as a way to fulfill to a niche met by the local newspapers that disappeared during mid-century shifts in newspaper publishing. One of the joys of place blogging, in William’s experience, is the opportunity it gives her to define for herself what is “important enough to cover” and she asserts that we will only appreciate the value of a placeblog when we see it as a “sustained attention to place over time” that foregrounds “the lived experience of a place” (“If I didn’t”; “Placeblogs” 8:52).
The Ethos of Attention
Williams admits that it can be difficult to find local places interesting, especially for those looking in from the outside, and she confesses, “I used to find Watertown boring until I started to really pay attention. This attention allowed her to realize that places, when viewed closely from the inside, are “gnarled and lively as any Russian village ever to grace the pages of Dostoyevsky” (“If I didn’t”). Similarly, St. Laurent lists among his reasons for blogging locally the fact that his “neighborhood—from the 13/366 overlap to ‘downtown’ Varna—is just plain interesting” and the people who are there are “fascinating, and real.” The problem is that blogging conversations pitched at the national level tends to attract more than their share of attention by being “loud and continuous” and frequently “brutally polarized.” Such conversations, St. Laurent argues, dilute the energy people have to attend to the politics immediately around them: “National politics seem to blot out people’s attention for more local issues, and even keep people who could work together on local projects from doing so” (“Why Local?”).
The main problem, in St. Laurent’s view is not polarization and helplessness, but “lack of knowledge and often lack of interest” (“Why Local?”). As a result, he views the goal for his blog as “changing things at the margins, helping people who are slightly interested become more interested, and helping people who are interested enough and find local news too weak to find more information” (“Four Years”). After several years of his blog, he is able to assess that the site has “made a small dent in lack of knowledge, covering maybe 3% of what’s important in Dryden” and it is serving as “an index to further sources of information.” While “lack of interest is still a general problem,” he is encouraged that “it seems like politics is waking up here again (“The Problem”).
While Williams and St. Laurent begin their blogs to help them pay attention to place and figure out where are, they come to view their goal as cultivating the interest of their readers. Creating a compelling bogging persona is one way that Williams does this:
H2otown is written in the third person by a nerdy, self-absorbed, high-tech-gizmo-loving narrator. Writing in this persona allowed me one big thing the local newspaper wasn’t allowed: to be funny. And in Watertown, being funny is being truthful. (“If I didn’t”)
In typical self-deprecating fashion, Williams attributes her ability to enjoy paying close attention to the local to a kind of “nerdiness”: “A nerd is a person who can sustain attention in something long after a normal person has lapsed into a coma. Patiently, the nerd sits, until the object of its attention cracks and reveals its strange and fantastic inner life” (“If I didn’t”).
Williams credits Baristanet with helping her understand the role that one’s blogging persona can play in a citizen journalism site. Baristanet, one of the first and most well-known of examples of online “citizen journalism,” was started in May 2004 in Montclair, NJ. It now receives 5,000 daily visits and was named by Williams as the number one place blog in America. Debbie Galant, co-founder of Baristanet, makes it clear that while she has “dwelled in, or near, or at least been somewhat associated with, some of the most hallowed halls of journalism,” she sees what she’s doing in Baristanet as something different:
Like my father, I’m a publisher. But I’m not sure I’m a journalist. Journalism is nonfiction. It belongs with history and politics and business and current affairs. I read, and write, novels. I’m more interested in why the pool is closed tight on a sunny day than in the town government’s master plan. I’m more interested in a little girl’s enchantment by the National Press Club 40 years ago than I am by the powerful men and women of the National Press Club today, and the powerful men and women they cover. (“The Walter Winchell”)
She proceeds to create a vivid distinction between the mainstream national media and her role with Baristanet:
Now, on the other hand, I dwell in the journalistic equivalent of a roadhouse—a neighborhood newsblog—where I stand behind the counter, a dirty dishtowel over my shoulder, barking at the rowdies in the corner to keep it down, serving up mugs of draught and occasionally pulling up my skirts to show a little ankle. (“The Walter Winchell”)
Elsewhere, Galant figures the site as a favorite coffee shop “where the baristas remember your drink order” and its “‘baristas’ give its readers exactly what they’ve come to love—a mix of original reporting, as well as aggregated news, all with Baristanet’s unique voice and perspective.” Readers make themselves at home there through the comments and other content that they contribute in response to posts or to events happening around town (“About Baristanet”).
While an ethos characterized by humor and irreverence can help cultivate interest in local blogging, simply presenting one’s self as a local blogging for locals can also serve to contribute to an effective ethos. In Jay Rosen’s view, this is what makes the difference:
From a journalism professor’s point of view, the significance of placeblogs is the intimacy factor—neighbor-to-neighbor rather than professional-to-public communication. A placeblog about the Rittenhouse Square area by a pro who lives in Overbrook Park wouldn’t make any sense. That and the fact that every prescription for survival in the newspaper biz says: go local, that’s your niche without typically noting that others may be better at that niche. (“Check Out”)
The ethos of a neighbor writing for a neighbor is constructed out of both proximity and amateurism: it matters that someone lives nearby and is not getting paid to say something about local issues from somewhere else.
Cultivating Local Audiences
St. Laurent further foregrounds the issue of audience proximity by arguing that place bloggers should be actively cultivating a local audience: “It’s great to publish material that can reach a wide audiences. Sometimes it’s also great to publish for a smaller audience (“Looking”). The suggestion that one’s goal might be to cultivate a smaller audience runs counter to common assumptions about what makes a blog successful—namely, how many readers one has. By contrast, the success of a local blog is measured by its ability to foster deeper local involvement over time: For St. Laurent, a shared sense of local is one way to create commonality that can give political discourse longevity beyond the typical election cycles: “Issues and places seem to drive long-term interests better than candidates; even when the elections are over, the issues and places remain.” St. Laurent observes that the specificity of local issues has a richness that can ground and enliven interactions between those who share a common locale:
Talking about local issues almost always means talking about the concrete, and people’s own hopes and fears come to the surface easily. It’s not (usually) about political party or ideology, but rather about how best to get things done, and how to choose which things need to get done. The variety of perspectives is amazing, and the overlaps and crossovers in how people would like to prioritize are both marvelous and perplexing. The hard part is getting them talking. (“Why I’m not”)
As Williams points out, “news is a conversation starter” but these conversations often want to travel to material that would not generally make the newspaper. The problem, however, is not just that newspapers are not covering all the local “news” that people would like to discuss, but that “the civic space for those types of conversations has shrunk.” Local blogging provides another space for these conversations to flourish in a way that does not just encourage the expression of views but also listening, which St. Laurent points out, is “a crucial political skill, given the time and focus to adjust messages over time” (“Why I’m not”).
But what differentiates a community of locally-based bloggers from a placeless community of interest like the popular technology blog Slashdot? In Rosen’s view, “what makes it different is the town. The town is a “player” because the writer’s connection to it, and the readers’ with all their connections make the site go. There’s already a huge amount shared before the site does its magic” (“It’s different”). For Rosen, it matters that Williams both blogs about Watertown and sleeps in Watertown. A community of interest whose focus is a local place becomes a community in the traditional sense: “a human settlement on earthly soil—the second oldest we have, after the wandering tribe.” As Rosen puts it, “a lot of meaning is built up around it, even though we are investing more and more of ourselves in our other memberships, including cyber ones (“Apparently”). A site formed as a community of interest depends on connections to be formed by the work of the site alone; in this way, Slashdot and H2otown function in much the same way. However, readers of a place blog based in a particular place bring with them pre-existing connections and relationships that might be activated automatically even before the site has done any work to connected them.
Creating an audience of physically proximate readers changes one’s sense of responsibility. John Udell gleans two “laws of local blogging” from talking with St. Laurent. First, “responsibility is inversely proportional to community size.” Blogging locally makes it difficult to remain anonymous, and in St. Laurent’s view, this affects the tone of his writing and the way he interacts with readers and neighbors. In his experience, “the level of responsibility increases as the size of community decreases” and the content of his blog “has to be a lot more accurate because people will call you on it” (“Simon”). While members of a community of interest will also call each other on inaccuracies in content, St. Laurent suggests that there is something different being called on something in the local grocery store rather than just in a comment. As Karl Martino puts is in a discussion of Lisa Williams place blogging,
The closer you are to a subject, the more you know about it. The more responsibility you have to it. Especially if your subject matter lives down the block from you. There is certainly something to be said for this. I’m not sure there is anything more courageous in media than a reporter with local focus. (“Sorry”)
In some cases, a reader down the block is not the same as a reader across the country, and blogging a neighbor about your shared place makes a difference for both involved.
St. Laurent’s second law of local blogging is, “Don’t make people spit out their coffee.” For St. Laurent, blogging locally creates a “tight feedback loop” which tempers the bombastic, polarized rhetoric that political blogging tends to encourage at a national level:
Dealing with the threshold where people don’t really trust what they read is something I worry about pretty consistently. My usual rule is that nobody should have to spit out their coffee when they’re reading it. I have a neighbor up the hill who’s a conservative Republican, and I count on him to tell me when I’ve gone too far. Having that kind of tight feedback loop makes it possible for me to write things that I know will appeal to a lot of people. (“Simon”)
Writing for the “neighbor up the hill” makes St. Laurent more concerned about sharing local knowledge for the good of the community than about advancing particular political views. In other words, blogging locally makes it more difficult to create what Sunstein calls the “echo chamber” in which you only interact with those who agree with you (116).
Blogging for a local audience can have the added benefit of enabling people who live nearby to meet each other. St. Laurent recalls how the early promise of the web seemed to be in its ability to connect people from around the world with shared interests who previously would have been prevented by geography from getting to know each other. But recently a shift has taken place and “we’re learning about how these technologies can help us communicate on a much smaller scale, helping us look beyond the walls and property lines of our homes to connect with our neighbors (“Spreading”). One of the benefits of cultivating a local audience is that interactions on one’s blog can enrich and grow one’s local relationships more broadly. As St. Laurent describes it,
Writing about the community has also pulled me out of my house and deeper into the community. I’ve met many times more people locally in the last year than I’d met in my previous five years of living here. My mental rolodex is long since exploded. I’ve joined the Historical Society and the Town’s Democratic Committee, and wound up the Chair of the Democratic Committee. Blogging always seems to end up making people participants, and that definitely has happened to me. It sure wasn’t what I expected as I was setting up Movable Type! (“A Year”)
Baristanet founder Debbie Galant relates a similar experience:
From my viewpoint, the satisfaction comes when I walk down the street and have one person after another greet me—people whom I didn’t know 18 months ago. It comes when wives tell me this is the first time their commuting husbands ever knew anything about the life of the town. When big-time journalists blackberry me from the train to let me know that there’s “suspicious activity” at the station and they wonder what’s going on. When mayors from two of the towns we cover post comments. When a tiny item we run about a church bingo game generates a huge crowd the next week. (“The Walter Winchell”)
In Galant’s view, it is this “sense of connectedness” that makes local blogging both “different than blogging and different than journalism.”
The Need for Neighbors
For Galant, Williams, and St. Laurent, place blogging matters because it has a concrete effect on the quality of the relationships they have with the people who live near them. St. Laurent states this most explicitly when he describes his need for neighbors as one of the reasons he blogs locally: “I’m convinced that we’re all going to need our immediate neighbors more in the future.” He proceeds to explain what he means by this:
Why? Because pretty much everything that’s made it easy to ignore our neighbors depends on cheap energy. I don’t see much hope for thinking that energy will stay cheap, as worldwide demand is increasing much faster than supply. Some key parts of our supply may be peaking or even declining, and neither ethanol nor hydrogen will magically provide us with more cheap energy. (Nuclear energy and alternative sources may help buffer that, but “too cheap to meter” doesn’t exist.) We’re going to have to adjust to gasoline, natural gas, and electrical prices climbing, and will have to figure out how to economize on a lot of things that once seemed cheap. (“Why Local?”)
Here St. Laurent makes a direct analogy between the local food movement and local economies attention: cheap energy has “made it easy to ignore our neighbors,” and by extensions, to not pay attention to the local.
Two months earlier in a June 28, 2007 post titled “Eat local,” St. Laurent had announced that he and wife intended to eat locally as of August 1 that summer, attempting to limit themselves to foods that come from New York and Pennsylvania. Eventually, he hopes to be able make his local eating even more local, though he acknowledges that our systems of production no longer support what used to be the way everyone ate: “There’s no reason why everything we eat couldn’t come from Dryden—except that the world isn’t organized that way any longer. New York State still has tremendous agriculture, though, and we hope it’s organized enough for us to find our way.” Similarly, the web has not been structured to encourage local economies of attention that help manage attention toward local places and communities. Part of what place bloggers are doing is trying to create interest in the local by offering alternative economies that make it easier to allocate attention towards place.
Williams describes how H2otown creates a local economy of attention that enables her to foster deeper attentiveness to place, much like Thoreau claiming, “I have traveled a great deal in Concord.” After having children made travel and residential mobility less part of her life, she found an outlet in place blogging: “H2otown allows me to substitute traveling deeper for traveling farther” (“If I didn’t”). For place bloggers like Williams, choosing to blog at a local scale brings about a change in perspective and affects the way we view the people around us. As St. Laurent states it,
When we start thinking about people in huge numbers, it’s easily to abstract away their humanity, and treat them as blocks. When we focus on people in smaller numbers, we can start to see what we have in common with them, and what we don’t have in common, and work on ways to build that commonality—even when it’s difficult. (“Why Local?”)
While Ecotone bloggers expressed their commitment to seeing place as more than the backdrop for human action but as an actual character in our personal stories, St. Laurent sees local blogging as a way to keep our neighbors from blending into our surroundings:
Our neighbors aren’t just part of the landscape—they’re our community. People who can help us, and people we can help too. We may not agree with our neighbors, and we may sometimes not even like our neighbors, but all of us together will define what happens to the place we share. (“Why Local?”)
Place blogging in itself is not enough to help us re-connect people with places and re-invest in our communities, but it is one important way to create local economies of attention in a networked society: “Building those connections is what Living in Dryden is all about. The site itself can’t create the connections among its readers—but hopefully it makes it easier for you to build those connections” (“Why Local?”).
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