SubscribeMy car, my house, my face: microblogging and the hyper-personal
Posted in News, Hyperlocal Journalism on August 9th, 2007. By Maren Hermans.
Everybody is wondering what to do with hyper-local journalism: Can it work? How? Maybe, hyper-local is just too close to hyper-personal? Or is it the same? The hyper-local’s doom could be the hyper-personal’s glory. While social networking sites are more popular than ever, hyper-local sites are not flourishing.
It started with an interview with Len Brody, CEO of NowPublic, a hyperlocal news platform. Brody’s citizen journalism site is one of the few that managed to make some money. But his view on the state of hyper-local reporting surprises:
‘I used to think that hyperlocal was what mattered to people, but for 35 and under especially, the concept of local is very different. Like Facebook publishing the news feed… it’s changed from hyperlocal to hyperpersonal.’
The future of news’ Steve Boris calls it ‘hyper-me’, and his view differs from Brody’s: Boris wants to think of hyper-personal and hyper-local news as the same thing.
However, who I am, where I am, and what is happening is clearly connected. The coverage of the Virginia Tech Shooting on Facebook was the best example. Information is becoming a free good, distributed by many people, accessible on many levels: ‘Telling my story’ can become the story of my people, of my situation, of my times. ‘The rise of mass-self communication’, how Manuel Castells calls it, gives us the autonomy and power to speak for ourselves in public. This makes a distinction between hyper-personal and hyper-local very vague indeed, because the one goes hand in hand with the other, as we all are products of our time and place.
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