On May 20, 2004, Fred First reflected on his first two years of blogging with the following post in Fragments from Floyd:
I marvel at how things have turned out—and are still turning—since May of 2002. What seemed at the time like an ending and a featureless void for a future has morphed wonderfully into so many opportunities for exploration and creation and discovery. I could never have imagined. Two years ago I began to see myself not so much by what I do for a living as where it is that I do my living. I began to chronicle the extraordinary things in an ordinary life, frankly, because I did not know what else to do.
Now, I can’t conceive of not having this journal and my reader-friends, some whom I have never heard from but know you are there visiting Goose Creek from time to time. And the best part—and the intended end of all this, insomuch as there were intentions—through the blog…I am meeting people locally and getting involved in what I used to call “real” community. Now, I don’t make such a hard-edged distinction, because what happens via the weblog is also real and is real community. (“A Thousand Points of Light”)
Like many bloggers, First has found a medium to facilitate a daily writing practice that documents his personal experiences and connects this writing with an online community of interested readers. But First also makes clear that this blog has a theme that grows out of a particular need—“Two years ago I began to see myself not so much by what I do for a living as where it is that I do my living” (italics mine). This concern with whereness reflects the unique qualities of First’s blogging, which takes as one of its central concerns the relationship between identity and place. This is no simple relationship, however, as one can see by First’s post. He seems to blur the distinctions between metaphorical and literal geographies and he testifies to the way his blogging connects him to actual communities, even as he is quick to resist any easy binary between his “real” community and his online community. First suggests that his practice of writing online helps connect him not only to a group of online writers, but also to the physical places that shape him.
First began to gather around him a network of like-minded bloggers who shared a commitment to reflecting on what it means to be in a particular place. Eventually this shared interest coalesced into a wiki they called Ecotone: Writing about Place. On their homepage, they described their mission:
The Ecotone wiki is intended as a portal for those who are interested in learning and writing about place. It came about as a meeting spot for a number of webloggers who write extensively about place in their own blogs and were wishing to work more collaboratively, as well as raise awareness to this genre of weblogs. (Ecotone)
The site aimed to define place blogging as a genre that encourages participants to construct a deeper sense of place through the medium of social networking software. During its active existence between 2003 and 2005, the Ecotone wiki served as a meeting place for more than 50 bloggers to discuss their interest in place and blogging. Their routine of posting bi-weekly topics provided a heuristic device to aid in the process of invention, spurring Ecotone writers together to produce more than 300 posts on a variety of topics during the two-year span.
Meanwhile, other forms of place blogging, variously called “local blogging” or “hyperlocal blogging,” were emerging in parallel to the Ecotone group in other corners of the web.^i^ Simon St. Laurent started his blog, Living in Dryden, in November 2003 where he writes for a local audience about local issues that impact the town of Dryden, NY. He has written about the practice of local blogging both in his blog and in a series of articles for O’Reilly Media in which he argues for the importance of blogging about local politics rather than politics on a national or international scale. Other locally-focused group blogs have emerged to offer a similar style of user-driven “hyperlocal” content often know as “citizen journalism.” One of the well-known early examples was Baristanet which began in May 2004 in Montclair, NJ and now receives 5000 daily visits by users interested in reading and commenting on a range of local news and information. Lisa Williams began a similar hyperlocal blog called H2otown in 2005 to gather news about Watertown, MA, an experience that prompted her to wonder how many other similar sites might exist on the web. In August of 2006, she bet Jay Rosen of Pressthink that she could collect 1000 independent placeblogs in the US, a project that led her to create placeblogger.com to publish her growing list and invite others to contribute their own blogs. Williams began writing and speaking on what she learned about the growing online citizen journalism movement through documenting hundreds of blogs from around the country.
At the time the earliest of these place bloggers were getting started, blogging as a genre had gained a high enough profile in the public consciousness that the basic characteristics of the form were fairly well known. They knew that blogs were “frequently updated webpage with dated entries, new one’s placed at the top” (Blood, “Weblogs”), and there were numerous well-publicized examples of what people typically did with blogs. Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds had established their pioneering political blogs, and Talking Points Memo had played an important role in drawing attention to the racially-tinged comments that cost Trent Lott his position as Senate majority leader. Anonymous blogger Salam Pax had gained a wide audience for his writing from Iraq and the term “dooced” emerged as a way to describe the act of being fired for blogging about work topics, thanks to Heather Armstrong’s pioneering experience. Despite Armstrong’s notoriety, most casual observers of blogging at this time might have assumed the genre was mostly about politics and technology and were written mostly by men, based on the examples most commonly cited in the mainstream media.
However, other strains of blogging were floating around the web, leaving plenty of space for bloggers to explore varied approaches to the genre. Some documented the details of their everyday lives in the form of public diaries while others used blogging to share their interest in particular topics, from knitting to French cooking to avian flu. As place bloggers, I would argue that we blogged out of a need to figure out where we were, as a form of digital wayfinding in a changing cultural, technological, and environmental landscape. Many of us were transplants, trying to put down roots in new places, often after having uprooted many times in the past. Many of us were keenly aware of how places around us were rapidly changing even once we decided to stay put. And many of us shared concerns about how our relationship to place impacted the health of the ecosystems we all depend on for health and survival. There are many ways to respond to the needs we felt, but we turned to blogging as one way to rebuild our connections with place, connections we felt we could not take for granted or assume would come to us automatically.
As Michael Curry has observed, there is always “a close interconnection between the technologies available for communication and representation and the ways in which people have conceptualized space and place” (“Discursive” 502). As more and more of our everyday experience is mediated by networked communications, it becomes important to ask what affect this mediation has on the way we relations to place. In particular, it is useful to situate place blogging in the transition from early forms of web culture to what is commonly called Web 2.0 (also known as social media participatory media, social networking software) which created new and complex ways to maintain social relationships and share information. At the time that blogging emerged, the relevance of geographic places for our sense of identity and community seemed uncertain as life in the modern work was increasingly mediated by networked technologies that appeared to allow us to transcend the limitations of place.
Residential mobility, environmental change, and technological developments all have conspired to change the ways in which we attempt to put our lives in context. What does it mean to be here, now? Who are our neighbors? What local information can we trust? What feels like home? Place blogging has now become one of the many different strategies people adopt to answer these questions, and the story of place bloggers like First is an account of how people use the technologies available to them at any given cultural moment to explore the relationship between who they are and where they are, as Wendell Berry as put it. Paying attention to their experience offers insights into the persistent importance of place even in an increasingly networked and globalized society.
This study examines the emergence of place blogging as an online genre designed to foster a deeper sense of place and to share local knowledge. Focusing on a period between 2003 and 2006, it spotlights a transitional moment in web culture when the relationship between online life and offline life is undergoing an important shift. The bloggers highlighted in this study offer a ground-level view of how ordinary writers and readers participate in the transition to what Eric Gordon calls “network locality,” a condition in which the experience of place is increasingly mediated by networked technologies. Because networked life creates an information-saturated environment in which place must compete with everything else for an increasingly scarce resource—human attention—place bloggers redefine blogging as a way to more deliberately and regularly invest attention in place. To do so, they remediate older genres to create a blogging style that differs from the political and technology blogs that were popular at the time: some draw on nature writing and diary writing (essayistic place bloggers) while others tend to draw more heavily on genres of local journalism (journalistic place bloggers). A rhetorical analysis reveals how genre remediation offers place bloggers a range of strategies for managing the flow of attention between self, place, and audience as they interact around digital objects in the network. These insights represent an important contribution to the scholarly conversions that are exploring how online forms of rhetoric continue to evolve and how our ideas about place are adapting to life in a networked society.
According to Barry Wellman, the transition to a networked society is a cultural paradigm shift in which the social ties that in the past might have rooted us in particular places are now dispersed over multiple locales, a society in which place identity is more commonly shaped by “surfing life through diffuse, variegated social networks” than by a close identification with a particular, bounded geographical location. In a networked society, Wellman says, “boundaries are more permeable, interactions are with diverse others, linkages switch between multiple networks, and hierarchies are flatter and more recursive.” Instead of limiting ourselves to one group, we “cycle through interactions with a variety of others, at work or in the community and our “work and community networks are diffuse, sparsely knit, with vague, overlapping, social and spatial boundaries” (Wellman et al. “The Social”).
In the past, knowing where we were was made easier in that the reach of our social networks mapped more closely to the dimensions of our physical communities, forming what Wellman has called “little boxes” in which friends and relatives tended to live in the same neighborhoods or in nearby areas and community was created by face-to-face meetings and regular encounters in shared spaces; however, several cultural shifts have undermined this way of organizing society: our family arrangements have changed as more of us are divorced and more couples work outside the home more frequently. Our longer commutes mean we spend more time shuffling between work and home and less time fostering relationships with our immediate neighbors; and technological changes in transportation (cars, freeways, air travel) and long distance communications (telephones, computers) make the distances between people and places seem smaller (Wellman et al. “The Social”).
Community has always extended beyond physical neighborhoods, as Wellman points out, but until recently we did not have the social and economic forces extending our social networks across distances nor the technologies to easily maintain those distant ties. As a result, many of our relations are disembedded, to use Anthony Giddens’ term, pulled up out of the local contexts in which they might have been rooted in the past and resituated in more dispersed contexts, often held together through ubiquitous and increasingly personalized digital communications tools (21). As William Mitchell observes, we “now increasingly live and work within a culture of presence, rather than one of propinquity” (93) one characterized by what Melvin Webber has called “community without propinquity.” Community is frequently shaped more by interests shared among individuals without reference to location than by the kinds of relationships that form among people who need to get along because they share a common physical place (51).
Networked technologies, then, change our sense of context—what is relevant to us, what is close to us, what affects our lives. In the networked society, what is important is not proximity but connection, and networked technologies are particularly good at helping us make connections regardless of our location. This is what has been exhilarating about the rise of the web—we now can learn about what is happening in other parts of the world in real time and foster relationships with people who in the past would have been too far away, out of the context our lives. Such benefits would suggest that the network is better at situating us in a global context than in local ones, raising the issue of what affect this might have on our ability to pay attention to what is happening at the level of physical locale, to the seemingly more limited, circumscribed world of our mundane place-based lives.
From this perspective, it might seem odd that place bloggers would turn to the web to foster a deeper sense of place. Indeed, during the early days of the web, the assumption that local knowledge was at odds with networked experience seemed commonplace, as we tended to think of online life and “real” life as very different arenas, the difference between the “space of flows” and the “space of places” or between the world of atoms and the world of bits (Castells 409; Negroponte 4). The early utopian rhetoric of the web tended to celebrate cyberspace as an alternative to normal life that allowed us to transcend the limitations of our bodies and physical places. In his 1996 book Being Digital, Nicolas Negroponte, founder of MIT’s media lab, predicts that cyberspace would render place irrelevant:
In the same ways that hypertext removes the limitations of the printed page, the post-information age will remove the limitations of geography. Digital living will include less and less dependence upon being in a specific place at a specific time, and the transmission of place itself will start to become possible. (165)
Negroponte views the concreteness and specificity of place as an impediment to modern existence, and he imagines a future in which technology would fully domesticate place into a harmless backdrop for our digital lives:
If I really could look out the electronic window of my living room in Boston and see the Alps, hear the cowbells, and smell the (digital) manure in summer, in a way I am very much in Switzerland. If instead of going to work by driving my atoms into town, I log into my office and do my work electronically, exactly where is my workplace? (165)
Negroponte imagines the web liberating us from the limitation of our bodies in place, the inconvenient quality of only being able to be physically in one place at a time. Networked technologies enable consciousness to extend well beyond the local, beyond where our bodies can be. Communication across distance is not new, of course, but the ease and speed with which we can now interact digitally has brought us to a new generalized state of space-time compression (Harvey 240).
Not everyone has accepted the notion that place is meant to be transcended, however; skeptics have objected to the utopian rhetoric of cyber-evangelists such as Negroponte which seemed to represent a naïve denial of the body, a Gnostic fantasy with ethical consequences for the fate of local communities and the environment. For Negroponte, Switzerland is reduced to a scratch-and-sniff wall-hanging next to his computer, and it clearly is not a place he imagines taking his atoms for a walk, where he could risk stepping in some actual (analog) manure. Stephen Doheny-Farina, also writing in 1996, cautions that virtual communities of interest could be functioning as compensatory mechanisms that indicate the “geophysical community is dying.” He warns that “as we invest ourselves in the simulation, the simulated phenomena disappear” (27). In this view, the web can be seen as contributing significantly to a crisis of “placelessness” in contemporary culture.^ii^ Such anxieties about the death of place and the rise of the virtual have been figured vividly in science fiction works in which cyberspace offers an alternative to the despoiled physical world, but where the virtual turns out to be as nightmarish as the real. William Gibson’s seminal depiction of cyberspace in Neuromancer portrays an urban wasteland where cyberpunk “console cowboys” prefer the virtual world of the matrix to the urban wasteland of “meatspace” and where super-intelligent computers conspire to consolidate their power over humanity. More recently, The Matrix imagines a world where the machines have won, where networked life has become so real that users don’t realize that the Matrix is designed to keep them ignorant of the fact that their bodies are being used to generate power for their mechanical overlords. In both visions, what happens in the virtual world can still kill you—characters die from the violence they experience while “jacked in” to cyberspace—suggesting that virtual is not truly an escape from or an alternative to the real.
It was this rather caricatured view of the relationship between place and the web that place bloggers inherited from the first iteration of web culture. The way the early discussion of cyberspace was constructed forced people to takes sides: either you were for place and against technology or you were for technology and against place. The very act of putting “place” and “blogging” together into a single term, then, was an assertion of resistance to this line in the sand, this polarized way of thinking that failed to capture the complexity of lived experience, both the benefits and pitfalls of life in the networked society. At the time place blogging emerged, the shift to Web 2.0 was well underway, a time when web technologies were becoming more collaborative and user-friendly, allowing a vast number of average users to begin publishing content and socializing online. Online social networks increasingly overlapped with and reinforced physical communities, and the web increasingly became not where one went to escape from ordinary life but where everyday life took place.
The simplistic choice between “real places” and “virtual places,” then, proved to be a false one for many people. Barry Wellman argues that the “hypesters, pundits, and wired scholars” were shortsighted in their early declarations that the internet was “a place apart,” pointing to widespread research showing “that physical space and cyberspace interpenetrate as people actively surf their networks online and offline (“Physical Place”). In considering the relationship between place and the network, Mark Nunes suggests that we are now in a new stage of looking at the internet, one in which “the prophecies of the 1990s are being replaced by the banality of the network” (xxvii). As networked technologies become a more seamless part of our everyday lives, Rodney Jones asserts, cyberspace “does not create a ‘separation’ of spaces so much as additional layers of space within which participants can maneuver” (143). Eric Gordon calls this new stage of the internet “network locality,” a term which describes a “changing media landscape, where the relationships between user and information, body and space, local and global are shifting to accommodate emerging patterns of media consumption” (“Towards”).
Network locality resists the technological determinism implicit in early cyber-rhetoric that assumed network technologies will have necessary effects on our relationship to place, either emancipating us from the limitations of place and embodiment or undermining our ability to connect in meaningful ways with local places and ecosystems. If we view place blogging as participating in the emergence of network locality, we remind ourselves that technologies are cultural constructions that change in response to evolving individual and cultural uses. The question then becomes, as Christine Hine puts it, “How do people manage the coexistence of flows and places … ? What kinds of narratives still get told, where, and to whom? How do people interpret their locations, their connections, and their histories? (85). In May 2003, the Ecotone community of bloggers began attempting to answer these questions for themselves as they define place blogging. Beth Adams offered this description of their endeavor:
It’s really fairly radical what we’re doing—I think so anyway—we are taking rather old-fashioned ideas about “relationship to place” and translating those forward into a world dominated by technology that allows us, for the first time in the history of the world, to be anywhere. We need to somehow get across that we are grappling with this and its effect on us as human beings, but that it’s not about rejecting or criticizing the future, but rather about examining a new paradigm and embracing the best of it to create new kinds of place, while sharing all that’s wonderful about the natural world wherever we find ourselves—because we ourselves find this grounding, interesting, and meaningful. (“Running Discussion”)
The Ecotone members view place blogging not as a form of alternative reality but a way to mediate their sense of place, to connect in meaningful ways with their physical environments. Place bloggers are not particularly interested in virtual places as alternatives to physical places, but neither do they dismiss technological mediation as necessarily an obstacle to meaningful engagement with place. In other words, they do not seem to believe either that life in the networked society makes the local obsolete or that a deep sense of place can be cultivated only through physical encounters with places. They are less concerned with where place ends and cyberspace begins and more focused on the particular ways blogging enables people to foster a deeper sense of place.
It is not surprising that place bloggers would feel comfortable viewing the networked technologies as both part of the problem and part of the solution, since we now are used to turning to the network for an increasing number of personal and social tasks. In doing so, we now accept responsibility for creating and maintaining our social networks, and we look less to traditional groups, neighborhoods, or communities to supply our basic needs for belonging and help us figure out who we are. In what Wellman calls “networked individualism,” the “person has become the portal” now that we each have our own cellphone, e-mail account, IM name, Facebook profile. In this arrangement, “the person, rather than the household or group, is the primary unit of connectivity,” making use each the manager of our own customized social networks, our own “differentiated portfolio of ties” (“Changing”). Similarly, it’s increasingly common to view our sense of place as a something we must deliberately construct rather than something we inherit simply by residing in a community over time. Place blogging emerges in part as a response to this need and the desire of individuals to figure out where they are.
But locating ourselves by way of the network is not without its challenges, as Ulises Mejias points out:
Reapproaching the local through the network is not simply a case of arriving right back at where we started after a process of dislocation and re-location. It’s not simply reaching our nose around the back of our head. The mediated near that the network delivers is a slightly different near, familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. (Networked 26)
Mejias and Gordon describe how network technologies are revising the way we make sense of what is near and how we define what is “local” (“Towards”). It used to be that the near had value because interacting across distances involved moving physical stuff, whether one’s own body or other material goods, or paying to access expensive communication networks. One could grow a sense of place with less effort because one’s life was lived in the spatially proximate world of physically-bounded communities. When network technologies came along, they increased the ease and decreased the cost of interacting across distance, bypassing the constraints of spatial proximity in favor of social proximity. Information flows from node to node without regard to how close they are in the physical world; as Mejias describes it, what once was “spatially proximal” is now “socially proximal—what we feel is relevant to us socially, regardless of whether it is spatially near or far,” and this allows information to function as “the social glue that allows networks to transcend distance” (“Networked” 13, 9). Our friends and family are near because we are connected to them through networked technologies, and our stuff (at least our digital stuff) is near at hand because we can bring it up through laptops or mobile devices wherever we are (“Towards”).
The notion that nearness is created through social proximity and ubiquitous computing suggests that these interactions are frictionless and free. However, just as the apparently immaterial ether of the internet is based on very concrete server-farms that require staggering amounts of energy, so also are there real costs to the energy we expend interacting online. A critical audit of the costs of network locality reveals that the very ease and speed that has enabled the web to redefine the near—to move beyond the finite limitations of our bodies and locations—eventually collides with another barrier: the limitations of our attention.
I would argue that if the web can enable us to forget that our bodies can only be in one place at a time, it does so by creating the illusion that our minds can be in more than one place at time. Despite the “myth of multitasking” which would have us believe that “kids these days” have evolved the ability to pay attention to many things at once, neuroscience has shown that the mind only focuses on one thing at a time and when we multi-task we simply are actually “switchtasking,” shifting quickly between multiple objects of attention. While our relationships and our stuff might feel nearer to us than ever before, we are working with a finite capacity to pay attention to it all, and the costs of living beyond our means are becoming increasingly apparent (Crenshaw 17; Kirn). In Linda Stone’s view, we have moved into a state of what she calls “continuous partial attention” in which we can each exist as “a live node on the network.” She argues that this “always on, anywhere, anytime, any place era has created an artificial sense of constant crisis” as we “stretch our attention bandwidth to its upper limits … as if we expected our personal bandwidth to keep up with the ever increasing bandwidth that technology offered” (“Attention”). In her book Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, Maggie Jackson warns that co-mingling of online life and offline life brings with it the risk of chronically attenuated attention:
The physical and virtual worlds are always with us, singing a siren song of connection, distraction, and options. We rarely are completely present in one moment or for one another. Presence is something naked, permeable, and endlessly spliced. (63)
Jackson paints a dystopian picture of networked individualism in which “to cope and to keep up with our pulsing personal orbits, we live in worlds of our own making, grazing from separate menus, plugged into our own bedroom-based media centers.” Jackson argues that this stretched state of attention has turned contemporary culture into “the land of distraction” where “attention is restless and untethered, a wandering thing,” making us attentional nomads constantly on the move from one momentary resting point of awareness to the next (63, 67).
In a network society, information is abundant and social connections proliferate with greater ease and speed, and in this context place is just one more element competing for the finite amount of attention each of has to allocate. ^iii^ The phrase “paying attention” has long served as a “metaphor we live by,” to use Lakoff and Johnson’s terminology, a metaphorical concept that we use to make sense of the world (9-10). However, this metaphor has taken on risen in conceptual status in recent years as scholars and writers have begun to describe our current relationship with information as an “attention economy” (Davenport and Beck; Lanham; Goldhaber). Richard Lanham points out that if economics is the “study of how humans allocate resources to produce various commodities,” then it would seem that in an information society like ours, information would be the scarce resource that we have to figure out how to allocate. But in fact, the reality is exactly the reverse. We now have far too much information, and it is attention that is in short supply, making it a valuable commodity that we need to spend carefully (6). As Davenport and Beck point out, we are all both “producers of information, seeking the attention of consumers” and “information consumers … with a limited amount of attention to bestow upon the world.” How we distribute our limited attention, our “attention portfolio,” is based on our values and what we think we can gain from the exchange, which could be many different things: to “learn something, change something for the better, fix what’s broke, or gratify another human being” (11).
Lanham describes the attention economy as a massive reversal in the relationship between “stuff,” the material products and resources that used to be the base of the economy, and “fluff,” the immaterial layer of information and expression that now has gained prominence. In a society “where information and stuff have changed places,” Lanham argues, the role of human communications in culture—what used to be called “rhetoric”—takes on a new importance. While rhetoric “has traditionally been defined as ‘as the art of persuasion,’” Lanham argues, “it might as well be called the economics of attention” (21). Lanham asserts that in this context the new economists are the artists, the designers, and the writers because they are the ones best equipped to deal in the cultivation of human attention. Likewise, I would argue, place bloggers are in a unique position to explore the relationship between stuff and fluff in the attention economy because they both care deeply about the materiality of place and are actively shaping an important new tool of information exchange.
One productive way to define place blogging, then, is as an effort to manage and exchange attention in a way that fosters a deeper sense of place. Aware that place is just one among many objects that jockey for our attention in the attention economy, place bloggers are concerned about the personal and corporate costs of failing to invest our attention to the local. We can make an analogy with the food production and consumption: improvements in transportation technologies make it possible to have grapes from Argentina in January, but there are hidden costs to the environment in maintaining this kind of relationship to our food, costs that do not figure into tradition cost-benefit assessments. Similarly, if our attention is a limited resource, then we need to figure out whether the web’s tendency of pulling us toward a global perspective might be undercutting the attention we are allocating to the local. Place bloggers are interested in assessing some of these hidden costs of attention, and they aim to create what we might call local economies of attention, ways of managing and exchanging attention that deepens our sense of place. This provides another level to the meaning of place in the context of network locality: it not only grows from our physical experience of proximity and from the relationships and digital stuff we experience as nearby in network; it is also simply a product of what we pay attention to.
To understand more concretely how this works, we need to look closely at the specific practices of actual bloggers as they attempt to construct a sense of place and share local knowledge in the network. To this end, this study zooms in on bloggers who are defining place blogging during a pivotal period when cyberculture is undergoing the transition to network locality, roughly between 2003 and 2006. I focus largely on the group of bloggers who gathered around the Ecotone site, a loose network of like-minded bloggers looking for others with whom to explore the idea of place. While I will suggest that they may have been the first to explicitly define “place blogging,” I will also highlight others who were exploring place blogging in parallel with the Ecotone group: Simon St. Laurent, blogging mostly on his own, began advocating the notion of “local blogging” about six months after the Ecotone site was launched and Lisa Williams began gaining attention for her quest to collect place blogs in the summer of 2006. I will refer to the blogging of St. Laurent and Williams as “journalistic” place blogging in order to contrast it with the more essayistic qualities of the Ecotone group, but the differences between journalistic place blogging and essayistic place blogging represent poles on a continuum rather than competing options, differences in emphasis that foreground the common goals of place blogging to construct a sense of self-in-place and to share meaningful local knowledge. These strains of blogging have the same DNA but have evolved under slightly different generic conditions, and studying these variations allows us to better understand both how genres evolve and how they shape the relationships bloggers have with place.
The Ecotone community is particularly useful as a case study not because it was trend-setting or unique, but rather because they both practiced place blogging and talked about what they were doing at the same time. The creation of the Ecotone wiki temporarily formalized an otherwise organic network of bloggers around a common project and this affords them opportunity to articulate what they mean by place blogging. Since the community wiki they create is designed as a site for place bloggers to gather, they first have to define what they mean by place blogging and anticipate what meanings a diverse audience might bring to the table. The Ecotone community, then, offers a useful case study not because their notion of place blogging is the definitive one, but because they left a rich transcript of their conversations at a formative juncture in the development of blogging. This transcript, when read together with the journalistic place bloggers who emerged at the same time, provides an important snapshot of this transitional moment in media culture.
Part of my task in this study has been to reconstruct a coherent narrative out of what was from the start a complex and constantly shifting network of blog rolls, hyperlinks, and comments, a record of interactions that can feel closer to orality than to literacy at times. This project is, in part, an act of cultural preservation, an attempt to reconstruct one small chapter in the vast narrative of cyberhistory, to archive a narrow slice of internet culture with as much texture and richness as possible. Creating such a narrative after the fact is also an act of interpretation, one that necessarily reveals some things and conceals others depending on the particular lenses through which I choose to view this material. The arc of the narrative I create here is not the only way to tell this story, and it is not even necessarily the story the bloggers I follow would have told. I tell it this way in order to highlight this particular transitional moment in web history and foreground the cultural work these bloggers do in bringing about the conditions of network locality.
Broadly speaking, I approach this topic through the lens of rhetorical analysis, examining how people use language to get things done in culture. For the most part, I have taken a close look at the texts produced by place bloggers, their blog posts, their comments, and the discussions that they have elsewhere on about what they are doing. While I have interviewed some of the bloggers I follow and have even met with some them in physical places, my research is not directly about places themselves or the cultures in those places. Rather, I am interested primarily in how blogging works as a rhetorical form and how people use blogs to develop their relationships to places, questions I explore by reading texts closely and by situating texts in larger cultural and discursive contexts.
My goal is to put this subject in a set of contexts which enable us to take seriously both halves of the term “place blogging,” to see how place modifies blogging and how blogging can shape how we think about place. To do this, we need to examine blogging as a genre, by which I have in mind something more than a particular set of formal characteristics (“short, informal posts organized in reverse chronological order”) or even just a particular subject matter (place). Rather, I view genre in the way that Carolyn Miller has defined genres as “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations,” socially recognizable patterns that help people figure out how to communicate in particular cultural contexts (159). When people need to get things done rhetorically, they turn to the genres available to them and these provide the shared set of conventions and expectations that make communication possible. Moreover, this choice is tied to a sense of cultural kairos, a sense of timeliness or appropriateness of this rhetorical strategy in the particular interpersonal or cultural context. Place bloggers are motivated by the desire to foster a deeper sense of place and share meaningful local knowledge with others. This study investigates why they turn to blogging and how using this particular form influences how they accomplish their goals. However, genres are not simply static, formal containers for rhetorical action; rather, they are constantly shaped by the people who use them. Examining place blogging allows us to see how the rhetorical goal of fostering a sense of place contributes to the ongoing evolution of blogging as a form, and it offers insights into way this evolution depends on the adaptation, or re-mediation, of older genres into a new one.
I would argue that place bloggers turn to blogging as a form because basic time-oriented structure provides a heuristic for allocating attention to place over time. Place blogging does not have the obvious spatial components of other online tools like map mash-ups or Second Life; instead, it provides a mechanism for approaching place through time. Here I have in mind both meanings of time in classical Greek rhetoric, chronos as quantitative time that is regular, measureable, and structured, and kairos as qualitative time that is present in the moment of rhetorical timeliness and human activity. The chronos of blogging refers to the expectation of regularity and the sense of obligation that can result; if one fails to write with at least a modicum of frequency, then it can become more difficult to maintain an audience who expects new content on a regular basis. The kairos of blogging refers to the expectation that authors will write with timeliness, that they will post soon after whatever thought or event gave rise to the blog entry. The dual nature of blogging time—regularity and timeliness—encourages a writing practice in which the content of the blog gradually accumulates, leaving snapshots of experience along the way to mark the passage of time. For place bloggers, this time-base structure acts as a heuristic device that helps create the habit of engaging with place—not a habit that enables us to act without thinking, but rather a habit of attention that enables us to intentionally construct a deeper sense of place.
In the context of place blogging, the ability of bloggers to allocate attention to place is intimately tied to having others read and comment on their blog posts and then spending time reading and commenting on other blogs in return. This interaction with others is a central motivation for putting place into the network: it provides a way to construct a sense of place through discourse with like-minded people. While each of us has a sense of place that reflects our individual subjectivities, environmental psychologists Dixon and Durheim point out that place identity is not an individual creation but rather is produced in “the flux of human dialogue.” Place-identity is “something that people create together through talk: a social construction that allows them to makes sense of their connectivity to place and to guide their actions and projects accordingly” (32). Eric Gordon and Gene Koo describe this dialogic formation of place as a “placeworld,” the “sense of collective place that emerges from the conscious and deliberate discourse of a defined group of people,” that forms “when a group brings a place into shared relevance” (218, 206). In their formulation, “places become placeworlds when their inhabitants imbue them with meaning through communicative action. (206).
Understanding how bloggers construct and maintain a sense of audience is central to understanding how place blogging manages attention for its users. While the impetus for place blogging may arise from the individual desire to allocate more attention to place, it only works because it is part of what Rodney Jones calls a “social attention system” in which attention is exchanged in order to accomplish a variety of person and social goals.^iv^ Every post a blogger makes about place is an allocation of attention to place, and having others allocate attention by reading or commenting provides an investment that makes the blogger want to keep writing. From the readers’ point of view, this expenditure of attention requires a withdrawal from that limited store of time and energy that they have to give to their own places. However, reading-attention is also an investment that can have returns in other ways: 1) investing attention by reading and/or commenting increases the chances that others reciprocate the investment, and 2) they gain insight by reading how others interact with their places.
In the chapters that follow, I will trace how place bloggers experiment with these subtle dynamics of attention flow to foster local attention economies—the way they appropriate and reshape older genres, the way they explore notions of place and the self, and the ways they attempt to situate their audiences both in the network and in places. As I do so, I will be participating in scholarly conversations from several disciplines in order to attend fully to both elements of the topic—both “place” and “blogging.” While I primarily approach this subject matter from a rhetorical studies point of view and situate myself in conversations about reading and writing in the context of digital media, the findings of this study also contribute to conversations about place that normally take place in cultural studies, human geography, and sociology.
Chapter one explores how place blogging does not emerge ex nihilo at the hands of Ecotone members but rather through an evolutionary process in which something new grows from what came before. The Ecotone community defines place blogging by pushing away from certain existing blogging practices and drawing on older print genres that they “remediate” or reuse in the context of a new online medium. In particular, they push against politically-oriented blogging that dominates public perceptions of the form at that time while they embrace the more personal “online diary” style of blogging. As they focus on place as a topic for blogging, they also draw heavily on environmental literature, or writing nature, and genres like the journal and diary that have a strong chronological element. The definition of place blogging crafted by the Ecotone community is inevitably shaped by the genre ecosystem in which it evolves, and they view the “structure of attention” that results as a heuristic to help them more deliberately allocate attention to place, to foster a stronger personal sense of place over time.
Chapter two examines the ways Ecotone members view blogging as a way to foster a coherent sense of self-in-place, responding to the adage “You can’t know who you are until you know where you are.” As Ecotone members discover, however, where is actually plural in many cases: their sense of self-in-place is actually made up of many places, both where they are now and other places, past and present. While Ecotone bloggers give their individual blogs priority in representing the self, their blogs do not necessarily create a one-to-one alignment between one place and one self. Rather, Ecotone bloggers view place as one way of filtering the set of digital objects they have assembled to stand for themselves in the network. In discussions of place identity within the Ecotone community, it becomes clear that while they value having a meaningful relationship with place, they are not expecting place to ground their sense of self in any simplistic way. A blog does not reflect the individual’s unitary relationship with a single physical location so much as blogging helps users construct and maintain a multi-local self, one not only rooted deeply in where they live but also connected in meaningfully ways to other places where they used to live or where they occasionally visit. In other words, the Ecotone group comes to view place blogging as a tool for inventing and maintaining the multi-local self over time.
If it turns out that the self is made up of many places, it also becomes clear that the audiences Ecotone bloggers write for are also located in many places, most of which are different from where they actually live. Chapter three explores how Ecotone bloggers find themselves negotiating between the value of paying attention to their own places and the desire to cultivate an audience of readers, most of whom live somewhere else. It becomes clearer that the way blogs enable people to allocate attention to place is intimately intertwined with the exchange of attention between people and places via the network. The way Ecotone defines place blogging makes them heavily dependent on outside investments of attention. Managing their own attention to place depends on distant audiences who they must position as visitors because they do not share the same physical places, but maintaining these relationships inevitably requires them to allocate some of their attention to other places where they do not live. While they see blogging as a heuristic device, a kind of lens that helps them zoom in on their own places, they also value the perspectives of their distant audiences, a view that requires them to zoom out to view their own place from the broader vantage point of the network. Ecotone bloggers find that accounting for real costs of managing attention to place is more challenging than they first realized.
Perhaps the accounting would be easier if they simplified their approach: write about the place where you live and for an audience who lives there; or put differently, perhaps a true local economy of attention requires keeping the circulation of attention closer to home and avoiding dependence on outside investment. As I explain in chapter four, this is the approach that characterizes journalistic place blogging, a strain of place blogging that evolves independently of the Ecotone group under a different set of generic and cultural conditions. Like the Ecotone bloggers, Lisa Williams and Simon St. Laurent begin blogging to figure out where they are, and they define place blogging in reaction to the overcharged political blogging that dominated public perceptions of blogging at the time. Their definition of blogging draws more directly on journalistic genres, genres which foreground the creation of local knowledge more than the presentation of the self. Instead of constructing an audience of travelers and tourists, journalistic bloggers intentionally cultivate an audience of neighbors, and the closer alignment between audience and place creates a different pattern of attention, one in which the exchange of attention between authors and readers overlaps on a shared physical location. Journalistic place blogging draws attention to the affordances of physical proximity, the particular quality of interactions that are possible because people relate to each other both online in the network and offline in a shared locale.
In chapter five we return to the Ecotone group were we find that First’s place blogging has continued to develop, an evolution we can trace through a series of blog posts that illustrate how he negotiates between an audience of visitors and an audience of neighbors, between the benefits of gaining greater attention through networked interactions and the responsibility for how these interactions might be organizing his readers’ attention to place. The challenge for First, as for other Ecotone bloggers, is how to create interesting writing that will attract the attention of a supportive audience without also creating desire in readers for places that are not their own, in effect diverting attention that they should be allocating toward their own places. As he continues blogging, Fred’s involvement with his local community grows and he begins to blog more frequently about matters immediately relevant to a growing audience of local readers. In the end, First works to maintain an audience of both visitors and neighbors, creating an example of local economy of attention that succeeds, however tentatively, to balance the beneficial reach of the network with a grounded commitment to a particular place.
While First and the other place bloggers I follow did not create the conditions of network locality on their own, the narrative of their evolution reveals the significant legwork they have done in figuring out how to practicing place in ways adapted to life in a networked society. Unless we choose to go off the grid and cut ourselves off entirely from the current social and economic system we inhabit, we must find ways to live a networked life that also allows us to foster healthy and sustainable relationships with the physical places where day-to-day existences takes place. Place blogging attempts to create a form of network locality in which networks and places are mutually constitutive, where the networks mediate our experience of place and places in turn influence the shape of networks. Place bloggers are not particularly interested in virtual places in themselves as alternatives to physical places, but neither do they dismiss technological mediation as an obstacle to meaningful engagement with place. They avoid the temptation to believe either that life in the networked society makes physical location obsolete or that a deep sense of place can only be cultivated through physical encounters with places. Instead, their blogging practice affirms that physical places still matter and they find ways to use the web to connect both to people across the country and people across the street.
Place bloggers assert these connections must be forged through a deliberate and ongoing investment of attention, both online and offline. According to Lanham, the ability to negotiate between places and flows is a vital skill for functioning in an attention economy:
We need to learn how to move more adroitly and self-consciously between stuff and fluff. We must understand better than we do now the paradoxical relationship between things and what we think about things. A comprehensive economics of attention will include both these ways of looking at the world and how we are to relate to them. It must be built on the perceptual oscillation that allows us to focus both in our minds at once. (22)
They are keenly aware of what Gordon articulates as the ethical stakes in network locality: “if we’re really interested in enhancing human connections and place identification through computer augmentation, how do we negotiate the user’s focus? How do we use the technology to build meaningful places and relationships, and not just meaningful networks?” (“More Thoughts”). They make the connection between a view of place as something dynamic that must be constructed over time and the practice of keeping a blog, which commits the blogger to a nearly daily habit of writing.
As a result, place blogging is not just a way to represent place as something finished or stable, but it is a way of practicing place as an ongoing process. This study highlights the particular strategies place bloggers adopt to build local economies of attention, rhetorical practices that realize the potential within blogging to concentrate attention on place rather than dispersing it into the endless extension of cyberspace. These localized attention economies do not strive for insular self-sufficiency; rather, they simply seek to create sustainable flows of attention that make it easier for people to allocate larger portions of their awareness to place. Paying attention to how place bloggers negotiate the relationship between networks and places offers insights into the challenges and opportunities many of us face as we attempt to locate ourselves the changing landscape of the networked society.