A lot of early chatter about the web and its impact on community and place-based enterprise (like arts organizations) talked about the elimination of the local. In an on-line world, your ‘neighbor’ could be defined by common interests, shared profession, or similar purchase behavior, just as easily as by geographic proximity. In fact, in an online world, you’d likely talk more with your virtual neighbor than you would your actual neighbor — leading to both Utopian and apocalyptic projections on the future of place.
But a few emerging and ubiquitous technologies are changing that future, and connecting place and on-line space in intriguing ways. Among those technologies are global positioning systems (now common to mobile phones, automobiles, and portable devices) and geotagging (the ability to attach latitude and longitude information to almost any on-line artifact — photo, web site, user profile, venue listing, and the like).
Now, through your phone or mobile device, your lens to the online world can be informed or filtered by where you happen to be standing. Instead of locating a coffee shop near a postal address, you can find a coffee shop near you — whether or not you know where you are.
As a result, several online initiatives are exploring the hyper-local opportunities of on-line presence, assuming that you still attach value to your physical location, even if you can talk to friends and colleagues around the world. The New York Times has launched an experiment in hyper-local news, called ‘The Local,’ that seeks to create a neighborhood lens for its global news machine. Other site and services, like Outside.in, are creating tools for other publishers who would like to do the same.
It’s not far off to imagine that any and all on-line content could include geotags, so that you could filter theater reviews, event listings, culture blogs, or political conversations to include only those related to your immediate surroundings, or your favorite places. And it’s not a big leap to see the opportunity for place-based institutions — like museums, theaters, performing arts centers, and such — to take a leadership role in ensuring such content is available and tagged appropriately.
We originally thought that the web would make our cultural work more global, increasing both our competition and our opportunity to draw audiences and resources. While that certainly remains an essential dynamic, there’s another countervaling force apparently at work: the importance of the local, the contiguous, the close-at-hand. That’s an extraordinary opportunity for arts organizations bound and defined by their communities, and committed to providing essential public space.
UPDATE: This story from TechCrunch shows some of the ways commercial, place-based businesses (bars, restaurants, and the like) are already trying to increase sales and return visits using location-based services like FourSquare.
