Chris Anderson Responds To The Long Tail Of Hyperlocal

Chris Anderson, the author of The Long Tail a PhD candidate at Columbia and the J-School blog, wrote a longish comment on my recent post, John McQuaid, The Big Die-Off, And The Long Tail Of Hyperlocal, which he then decided was fat enough to be a post on it's own, When is a Mass Not a Public, and What Does it Mean if it Goes Away?

I am reprinting the comment, and embedding my responses in [square brackets]. I think that John was disagreeing with some of what I said, but he doesn't make it exactly clear what he has issue with, really. I think the Charlie Brownish sigh at the start is a bad sign, though.

[from /Message: John McQuaid, The Big Die-Off, And The Long Tail Of Hyperlocal]

*Sigh*. I started my non-journalism career at Indymedia way back in 2001. What's happened to me-- what's happened to the world-- in the intervening 7 years to make me feel so old fashioned??

I am getting a little sick and tired of the endless blogsopherical linking of an economic / social reality (the possible end of "massness") with a normative claim (the end of "massness" is good thing, or at least, it's "inevitable," so we don't need to waste time talking about whther it's good or not). Marxists (remember them?) used to make this mistake. It's inevitable, so we don't have to judge it.

[Hmmm. Most of my claims about the progress away from mass media to social media are based on the assertion that people are making the switch, individually, because they are finding much worthwhile in the social and find much wanting in the mass. Perhaps that can be interpreted as a claim of inevitability. Mostly it is based on the empirical: people are making the switch, and pretty fast.]

So let's take a second to evaluate. And let's start with a couple definitional questions -- what's the difference between a mass, a public, a community, a niche market, and a social movement? And since this isn't my blog, let's just take the difference between mass and public. To what degree does the end of the mass mean the end of the public?

Here's how John Dewey defined the public: when private actions have indirect consequences that affect large groups, that interest group becomes a public, with a stake in regulating the actions in question. Now it's possible to argue-- and I've done so-- that social movement groups, communities, and even nice markets are more authentically "publics" that the public represented by that idiotic word "public opinion." And in many ways the end of the mass, with the possibility of creating more authentic, democratic, and local communities, would mean a more public world, and could be a world where hyperlocal journalism, done the right way, could flourish.

[However, I am arguing that hyperlocal will be a social reality, not some new configuration of newpaperish journalism, shrunk down to a zip code. If anything, I am arguing that, yes, the end of mass will lead to a decrease in people's identification with the large undifferentiated 'public' that newspapers hypothetically point their megaphones at.]

The problem though is that, in some key ways, the mass hasn't gone anywhere. In short, the metro newspapers may be dying, but guess what, people still live in cities! Their lives are still affected by other people who may not be in their hyperlocal coverage area. And most importantly, cities are still ruled by things like mayors and city councils and corporations and chambers of commerce. One the things monopolistic, dead-tree journalism used to do, or should have done when it was doing anything worthwhile at all, was make the public real.

So bottom line: when we all live in a truly anarchistic, communitarian world (a world I wouldn't mind seeing) then hyperlocal journalism (again, done RIGHT, and I haven't seen much of it done right) will be all we need. The problem, though, is that we're not seeing that world emerge. What we're seeing is the growth and centralization of power -- the EU, the executive president, corporate consolidation, etc.

[As the corporations that control existing mass media are confronted with the mass death spiral, they intensify and consolidate. We will see the continued firings and closings of newspapers, on one hand, so that corporate profits will be maintained. Some might experiment with hyperlocalism, but it won't work they way that they'll try to do it, because the 'reporters' will be 'reporting' on local activities in a non-partisan, disembodied way.

(We'll have to see what happens with the EU. I predict that regionalism in Europe will be the defining characteristic of its governance in the future, not the EU-level empire, no matter what happens with the new constitution there. But that's off track.)

We will see a handful of national newspapers -- WSJ, New York Times, USA Today -- become the remnants of the newspaper scene, since their readers will still identify with national identity, or their affiliation with the world of business, or liberalism. But at the local level, people will be switching to other modes: either alienation (like many young people, or the two million in prisons, or the illegals, for example), or a partisan involvement in one or more fragments of the local scene: music, street culture, art, artisan production, or local/natural food, for example. It won't be reporters, but reportage from those actually living and breathing the cultures involved. Perhaps 'rapportage' might be better.

So we will see both trends at once: the massiest top-down media will consolidate becoming more national (or language group based), and meanwhile more and more people will defect from mass identity, becoming enmeshed in bottom-up social realities, some of which will be hyperlocal.]

The metro daily may be dead, but the metropolis lives. Who's going to notice when the city council gives itself all new cars?

http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/cityhall/20569644.html

[That's sort of from left field.

Yes, we still have city councils, mayors, and school boards. My belief is that as people become involved in bottom-up localism they will begin to defect from involvement in those established civic organizations. Instead, people will begin to involve themselves in their own scenes, and to the degree possible, they will remain disengaged from 'public' life -- in the mass sense -- while increasingly living in what newspapers might characterize as 'private' life, since it is outside the 'public' eye as defined by newspapers.

(The fastest growing segment of education is home schooling, where people are dropping out of mass education in favor of small-scale and possibly biased tribal education, like ardent Christians, Moslems, Hasidic Jews, or immigrants. This is partly due to the failure of the mass education system, but partly due to inherent contradictions in Western liberalism, where is is legitimate to privately school our children but illegitimate to require the public school system to follow the norms of many colliding cultures, like vegans, Moslems, evangelical Christians, secular liberals, and immigrants.)

But this isn't private in a closed sense, since within their tribes people will be living in the open, but the tribal elders won't necessarily be working to get quoted on the society page, or running for public office.]

Comments

[Dennis McDonald]

I think this debate over a vague concept like "hyperlocalism" is misplaced. A more fundamental question, if we're talking about media and how people get information about the things that matter to them, is what defines the tipping point between information that is communally or voluntarily generated, and information that is produced professionally by people who are actually paid to do so.