Social media and a sense of place

Picked-up a link in twitter back in July to a post on the SustainableCitiesCollective – a forum I’d never come across before and one that I’ll dip into again. It aggregates blog posts and I picked up one from Julian Dobson who was commenting on the RebootBritain event. On his blog he posted – I’m sorry, Clay Shirky, nobody knows you around here. This is not only a wonderful title for a blog post but was also a very insightful contribution which caused me to think about new emerging digital divides,  such as those between the twitterati who profess to see the benefit of immersion in social media (using Web 2.0 tools) and those at the coal-face who either don’t (not even at the dabbling level), or who aren’t able to see how they can participate in any other way but at a trivial level – and thus contributing to the widely held assumption that indeed use of social media is all about trivia.

I commented at length and then managed to lose the comment I was making before posting it. {Don’t go there … please.} However, I wanted to record what came to mind here, because I think there are threads of a piece of work to be done here.

The most interesting point I felt is that Julian discusses the concept of place in the context of the use of social media. I didn’t know about digitalbutetown – a group in my own city. There’s no reason why I should, but it still came as a surprise to me because I like to think I’m pretty connected to what’s going on around me. It may have been discussed at the last meeting of trydan – a social media cafe group in Cardiff, but then again maybe it wasn’t. And that’s the point! Whilst we the enthusiasts are broadcasting to the world, the real value of social media moving forward will be where it is melded to social activisim linked to communities and places.

In a previous existance I was really interested in environmental psychology, and ideas of environmental perception and sense of place – how peoples’ perception of their environment could in impact upon their behaviour.  Now, by appropriate use of social media we have the ideal vehicle to enable communities to come together, to share and reflect together, and to move forward (changing their environment) together.

This post has been a long-time in “draft”, I’ll be returning to this theme and considering how social media could interact with ideas in environmental psychology to create different “sense of place”.

Further update on geolocation

Avid and regular readers of this blog – I know you’re out there somewhere – will have picked-up that I’m rather interested in geolocation, tracking and using tools and widgets to broadcast location. I can’t imagine why anyone would be interested in “Where I am?” apart from my colleagues in Cardiff who’re always asking whether I still need an office, so it’s really just a throwback to my former life as a geographer. One that brings ever more warm recollections.

So that’s the rather feeble justification over. What have I done now! Two things. Firstly I’ve implemented Navizon on my laptop and enabled it to update Fire Eagle using WiFi or cell information [now defunct]. I misinformed a colleague the other day on this one. It is possible and does work! You can also configure it for your Blackberry (alternatively you can use BBTrackr [now defunct] to do the same thing). I’ve not chosen to do either of these – you’ll see why later. I like Fire Eagle, it’s a repository which stores my location and then allows applications to draw that information and display it on maps – normally Google Maps. Currently I’m using blogloc [now defunct] to do that and the outcome is displayed in the sidebar alongside.

Note [19 May]: there’s a new Google Latitude Sync app [now defunct] that seems even better at updating Fire Eagle than any of the others so far tested.

The other development I’ve just implemented is a new extension to Google Latitude [now integrated into Google maps] which enables the information captured from cell-phone location to be displayed in live-form on a Google Map. The first use of this was to share geolocation information with your Gmail Chat “buddies” and for the select few who I have in my contact list this was a nice feature and caused us some mirth as we compared our movements across the city. The extension is to allow code to be implanted in a web-page, or for a widget to be aded to your blogger pages. So now (if you had access to my blogger account), you could see where I am. [Unfortunately, this feature is currently not working in WordPress, this blog – still investigating why that is 🙁 ]

As a postscript, I’m working on another blog which will be dedicated to this subject and my travels, and when public I will put a link in the sidebar to that site.