This dissertation on place began with a displacement. In August 1997, I moved from Newgard Avenue in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago to Boston, where I was about to begin a graduate program in English. I didn’t realize it at the time, but every mile that my friend Ken and I drove in our borrowed Chevy van was storing up potential energy for my academic work, creating exigency that would flow into the project that follows.
The transition from Chicago to Boston proved to be much more difficult than I had expected. When I left Chicago, I could imagine all the gains of moving to a new place while still young and unattached, but I had a harder time appreciating the losses I would accrue in the process. As I settled into my over-priced Boston apartment and threw myself into Romantic poetry and critical theory, I was overcome by a profound sense of dislocation, a deep sense that I had just left behind not just an address in Chicago but also a sense of identity that now seemed painfully distant. In one sense, I was participating in an academic rite of passage in which I was being “educated for the road,” as Eric Zencey has put it, groomed to take my place as a “rootless academic” able to relocate again once it came time to find a job. I soon realized I also was participating in more general cultural patterns of mobility that leave many of us conflicted about our relationships to place.
In order to make sense of my disorientation, I shifted my academic studies to nature writing, where the issue of human beings’ relationship to the environment was of central importance. This helped me diagnose my sense of ennui and better understand the role of rhetoric and writing in re-constructing a sense of place. But just as these interests took hold, I also began spending time learning web design, both for my teaching and for my own enjoyment. I found myself trying to reconcile the need to deepen my connection to place and the amount of time I was spending online. Ulises Mejias articulates the particular anxieties I was working through:
I realized then that my concern was related not to the amount of information I had to process everyday, but to my ability to turn that information into something I could apply in interacting with my immediate environment. With some worry, I started to notice an increased lack of relevancy that my immediate surroundings were acquiring, a lack of relevancy that seemed to be in direct proportion to the time I spent online. In other words, my apprehension seemed to be motivated by a desire to want to make online experiences relevant not just to my life in some abstract, virtual sense, but to my life as an individual embedded in specific social settings. (“Re-approaching”)
I attempted to work through these anxieties by combining what initially seemed to be separate spheres, life in place and life online, by exploring the rhetoric of place on the web. As early as September 2002, I began designing a website I called The Whereproject:
This website is one graduate student’s attempt to explore the question Where am I? in an online setting with the hope that it will offer insights into pedagogy, sustainability, web technology, and how to grow a sense of place in my urban environment.
At this point, I locate myself as graduate student a Boston College, a resident of the Allston Village neighborhood of Boston, a former resident of Chicago, a native of Fargo, North Dakota.
Along with this general description on the homepage, I posed the central questions that I hoped to answer by developing the site:
Where am I? How does one foster a rigorous sense of place in the midst of unreflective mobility, environmental irresponsibility, economic injustice, and advertising bombardment? How does one develop an ethical obligation to ones place, however short or long we inhabit it?
Are there ways to employ web technology to reconnect ourselves to place and foster sustainable lifestyles, or is the medium such that any message it touches will be determined by a distancing, alienating affect on experience and place-sense?
In what ways can web technology help enable me to rethink my graduate education in the humanities, to use it to overcome the insular, isolating, overspecialized nature of academic life?
The sections of the site reflected the heuristics for invention I would use to shape my writing—Map, House, Neighborhood, City, Destinations—and I set out to collect material in these spheres that radiated out from my most immediate environment to all the places that I had traveled to and come from. As the site grew, I realized what I needed was a tool that would make it easy to update the site on a regular basis, and it was not long before I discovered a relatively new form of web publishing called blogging.
The Whereproject in its blog format developed slowly during the next few months until, in October 2003, I began preparing a conference proposal that would explore the relationship between place and the web. During my research I stumbled upon an online community of bloggers who were also interested in place, sparking a moment of self-recognition which I noted in a blog entry:
This evening as I was trying to decide what to submit to the 2004 Computers and Writing Conference (since the deadline is this week), I ran across a great wiki on place-based blogging called Ecotone: Writing about Place. Now that I know that there is at least this community, I’m inspired to kickstart this weblog and continue my investigation into the genre of place-based blogging. Skimming through the site led me on a breathless scurry through numerous related sites and now I’m looking forward to exploring them more. But for the moment, I’m tired of being in front of the computer and I’m feeling like going out for a walk, now that I know that Ecotone is the kind of site I’ve been looking for. (Lindgren, “Ecotone”)
Many of the Ecotone contributors began blogging about the same time I did, and as I began to explore the discussion generated by their community, I realized that we all were caught up together in a particular cultural moment when place and emerging communication technologies were intersecting in new ways. While I continued to nominally maintain my own place blog, I found it more compelling to investigate the collective story that we seemed to be part of, a story that began with the Ecotone bloggers but led me to other place bloggers located in completely different corners of the web. Though I initially positioned myself as participant-observer, I gradually resigned myself to being primarily an observer trying to tell a broader narrative than I could by focusing on my own blogging. By understanding how and why they blogged the way they did, I hoped to better understand my own impulse to put place into the network.
During my years of researching and writing about place blogging, my relationship to place has evolved as I have begun a job and moved to new neighborhood in Boston—from Allston, a Boston neighborhood where I never felt connected—to Jamaica Plain, which reminds me of my old neighborhood in Chicago. The blog entries I have posted in recent years describe the process of getting to know Jamaica Plain from the inside, by biking new routes from here to work, watching the seasons change in the numerous nearby parks, attending neighborhood meetings and other community events. The entries describe the process of buying a condo and how being a homeowner has changed my relationship to the neighborhood, giving me a deeper investment in getting to know where I am.
In the final weeks of writing this dissertation, I have become more aware of my need to connect with my physical neighbors, particularly after one of them ended up dead on the sidewalk across the street from my condo. Garibaldis Pena, 27, was shot three times as he put a car seat into his sister’s car, the latest installment in a cycle of gang violence that usually seems far removed from this quiet corner of Boston. Though troubled neighborhoods in reality are only a few blocks away, they often feel socially and culturally far removed. While this incident does not make me any less happy to live here, it does make me more sensitive to the complexity of urban life and how my narrow perspective obscures the other layers of experience going on around me. And it reminds me that I have a lot to learn about where I am and what it means to know my neighbors.
Moreover, as I finish this project the worldwide economy is in freefall towards what looks to be a deep and difficult recession. At the same time, we appear to be living in a bubble in the attention economy, a period of overheated investment of attention that is leading us toward a crash of its own kind, what we may someday recall as “The Multitasking Crash” or “The Attention-Deficit,” as Walter Kirn predicts in his essay “The Autumn of the Multitaskers.” However, there can be an upside to these trying times if they force us to connect with our friends and neighbors more deeply and help us regain a commitment to living within our means, both economically and attentionally. We will need all the help we can get, and in the pages that follow I highlight the local economies of attention place bloggers have been building in their quiet corners of the web, using their blogs to imagine more sustainable ways of managing attention and relating to places. Their work can serve as a valuable resource to us in the ongoing process of figuring out where we are and what it means to live there responsibly, both in the neighborhood and in the network.