Abstract
What is the place of both immediate and mediated information in forming publics and sustaining communities? And what can past communication practices teach us in our digitally hyperconnected age? With reference to the work of philosophers, sociologists and theorists including Hannah Arendt, Jurgen Habermas, Keith Hampton and Barry Wellman, cultural researcher John Bingham‐Hall reflects on the nature of place, and highlights the phatic properties of online platforms such as Southeast London's Brockley Central blog that seek to reinforce local identity.
Highlights
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Why should we care about hyperlocal media? Because they will re-invent local democracy, connect citizens directly to one another in networks of cooperation and deliberation, produce data on the sentiments and opinions of constituents for their political representatives? Perhaps, though to attribute these utopian ideals to technology is to deny due credit to the physical labour still invested in the building of effective local publics
Summary
LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Original citation: Bingham-Hall, John (2017) Imagined community and networked hyperlocal publics. Communication technologies, for many designers, are imagined as instrumental: we should care about them because they help people do things.
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