The KCET Local bloggers* met with the station’s new media people on Saturday morning. The four-hour conversation wove through lunch and included, later in the day, more staff members in a discussion about social networking and KCET.
(*Ophelia Chong, Brian Doherty, Adolfo Guzman-Lopez, Erin Aubry Kaplan, Jeremy Rosenberg, Holly Willis, and me)
All of them are formidably intelligent and informed. The station’s new media people, in particular, have thought hard about the implications of social networking and the technology behind it. They have large ambitions. It’s as if they were standing beside railroad tracks watching a steam locomotive go by in 1900 already imagining a bullet train: what it might look like, how its infrastructure will work, what impact that would have on passengers and the places they want to go.
One of the places KCET wants to go is local, although “local” ought to have an elastic definition. (KCET’s signal goes a long way: north to parts of Ventura County, east to Palms Springs, and south to parts of San Diego County.) Local and the Web are places that overlap, of course, but the fit is problematic. There is no “here” on the Web; there are clusters of affinities and aspirations, however.
I write about why/how a particular place matters by writing about where I am. I’ll presume that particular places matter to you. I believe that places have a shaping power over lives, that they have something to do with our acquisition of a moral imagination. Places are where, in the crudest sense, politics happen. Places demand loyalty and continuity (and we are uncomfortable with demands and so footloose).
Can you acquire a sense of place at Facebook? That’s my part of the social media question that the bloggers circled around on Saturday. I didn’t have an answer. But maybe you might.
The image on this page was taken by Flickr user Luc Legay. It was used under a Creative Commons license.
Subscribe to Where We Are's feed.
I'm invested in the local but sometimes I wonder to what extent they're imposed constructs. Are we hard wired by evolution to seek the tribe, the village?
There are more than a hundred incorporated cities in L.A. and Orange Counties. I hear you can have more friends on Facebook.
I have a sense of "place" on Facebook. It isn't a real or physical "place", but more of a place in the swirling torrents on the web. It is a feeling of being everywhere, at anytime, from anyplace I log on. The world is more than elastic, it is free form and flows like a river that doesn't flow upstream or down but sideways, upside down, right side up, inside out.
It's a jumble of string that ties us all together into an expanding ball that has no end or beginning.
Great post DJ, your posts are always inspiring and mind warping. :O) ophelia
Where are we indeed? You are entirely right, everything is local, not just politics, but heart and soul and connection. So where is the "where" on the 'net? Is it simply the place you want it to be? That's so L.A. Too L.A. Thanks DJ, for putting the big question/s to all of us.