By 2007, a third of all search engine queries were made by people looking for local results. When people search for information, products and services online, most of the time they are intentionally searching for local information, products, and services. This not simply a matter of purchasing convenience; it often includes an intentional motive to build and maintain real world connections with others nearby. In the age of "bowling alone," these connections are a good and needed thing for our communities.

Most people, groups, businesses, and markets are rooted in particular places; their most valued and most common interactions are with their their real-world neighbors, constituents, and clients. Currently the web is evolving to cater to the "hyperlocal" reality of regional and metropolitan audiences and markets. The popularity of online social networking is both a model and an influence for this reorganization of the vaguely global "worldwide web" into a more clearly defined network of people and places. The web is gaining depth and value as a market and public communications medium as it grows, reorganizes, and around geographic places and real-world relationships, especially in urban areas.

This deepening and localizing process in the online world is happening alongside real-world relocalization (or glocalization?) in the (over-) developed world. There is now a renewed appreciation for and increasing public interest in local economies for their distinctive character, triple-bottom-line benefits, and their importance to sustainability.

Local knowledge is what a community's members have in common, and it pervades the language they speak. It can't be faked, and it defines what counts as clear communication delivered in an authentic voice.

NLM itself is a consequence of experimentation with open source software and online media to improve the local community by increasing civic engagement and participation through information and knowledge sharing. You can take a look at some of these ongoing experiments at riverwestneighborhood.org and creamcitizen.org.

It's the future. The web is becoming part of the air we breathe, the environment we live in, the clothes we wear--all part of one incredibly localized and social network.

Some of the best and most accessible tools for taking advantage of the opportunities of the digital age are freely available under open source or copyleft licenses. They're supported and improved by communities of millions of Do-It-Yourselfers at all levels of skill and ability that anyone can join.

The open source ethic and business model favors collaboration, community-building and a triple-bottom-line ethic which favors the small and the local.

Yes and no. The fundamental structures and concepts of new media are no longer new, but they will take a long time to sink into the thickest skulls and work past anti-change agents like corporate and government bureaucracies. Even when the concepts are familiar, when it comes to what people are actually doing with media, real innovation (as opposed to mere novelty) is rare, so it seems new when it happens. Creating and/or facilitating the transfer of real value between people may always be rare, even though large networked systems, chiefly the web, make that possible to an unprecedented degree.

The core skills and values of "old media" from the earliest days of printing are as relevant now (valuable and necessary) as ever--probably more so. But the social and technological context in which media exists--specifically commercial news media--has shifted substantially.

The transactional nature of the new media reaches its highest potential when used for cooperative ends through sharing and reciprocity. This is not what you see in environments where beancounters and lawyers hold sway. Standard institutional logic driven by greed, secrecy, deception, paranoia, and butt-covering means there will be a long, difficult resistance to doing truly new things and breaking away from business as usual.

"Media" has only ever mattered as public (out-in-the-open) articulation of ideas that, by being made public, stand to define or shape the public-as-people: how we think and act as individuals and members of groups and societies, and how we define those groups and societies. This never really gets old; it is always the only show in town. When it gets boring, it's because too many boring people are just trying to use media in uninteresting ways, probably because they don't understand or care about the obligation that anything you say to a lot of people had better be engaging, worth their time, and what they are looking for.

an inch wide and a mile deep

About New Local Media