{"id":66,"date":"2008-08-25T15:49:00","date_gmt":"2008-08-25T20:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/2008\/08\/25\/the-power-of-placeblogs\/"},"modified":"2008-08-25T15:49:00","modified_gmt":"2008-08-25T20:49:00","slug":"the-power-of-placeblogs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/2008\/08\/25\/the-power-of-placeblogs\/","title":{"rendered":"The Power of Placeblogs"},"content":{"rendered":"
I’m working on an article revision that examines power in the city and my short academic attention span has wandered over to the phenomenon of placeblogging<\/a> as a potential challenge to established centers of power. The traditional debate in the literature on urban power centers around whether power is mostly hegemonic <\/a>(power over) or transactional<\/a> (power to).<\/p>\n

I’m interested in the role that placeblogging might play in challenging both hegemonic and transactional power, but particularly the latter. A transactional view suggests that power is forged through the process of social production<\/a>. Social production is the process of pooling resources to achieve a desired goal. In the urban context, important resources like wealth, knowledge and political power are seen as narrowly controlled.<\/p>\n

However, placeblogs have the potential to redefine the social production process. While there aren’t many of them, they are growing. Lisa Williams<\/a> describes placeblogs as focusing on:<\/p>\n

the lived experience of a place. That experience may be news, or it may simply be about that part of our lives that isn’t news but creates the texture of our daily lives: our commute, where we eat, conversations with our neighbors, the irritations and delights of living in a particular place among particular people. However, when news happens in a community, placeblogs often cover those events in unique and nontraditional ways, and provide a community watercooler to discuss those events.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In their intent, these blogs are designed to reduce the costs of social production. One example comes from a website called Clever Commute<\/a> in which transit riders on the Baltimore Washington corridor alert each other of delays and cancellations. The Baltimore Sun reports<\/a> that the website has partnered with the Baristanet.com<\/a> placeblog to expand the service’s reach.<\/p>\n

In this case, if the end goal of social production is to gain greater information about commute delays, “the crowd” is a much better gatherer of knowledge resources than traditional news sources. The placeblog provides a convenient way to aggreagte information of interest to residents in a neighborhood. Recent development have made it easier to aggregate individual placeblogs. Type in outside.in\/(your zip code) and you will get an page that collects placeblog postings about your neighborhood. For example, here’s the page for my neighborhood<\/a>.<\/p>\n

My interest is in the potential for these networks of placeblogs to engage in social production that challenges power. Have placeblogs been used to stop development or to get a pothole fixed?<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m working on an article revision that examines power in the city and my short academic attention span has wandered over to the phenomenon of placeblogging as a potential challenge to established centers of power. The traditional debate in the literature on urban power centers around whether power is mostly hegemonic (power over) or transactional […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":129,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/129"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}