Socoloco and dirt

by Loren Johnson on Friday, October 05, 2007

I’ve been blessed to live in a place where I have a strong bond to most of those that I live near. Yet, in this idealized setting, where the local and the social do blend exceptionally well, I still find myself more impassioned by certain cultural memes upheld by a much larger and physically desperate community than I do by local events or politics.

In this Stowe Boyd article on the bust of Backfence.com he juxtaposes yesterdays buzz term hyperlocal to a more tuned version “socially local” (or “socoloco” for street cred). The idea is simple—while we each live in our own small “local” circles these circle for most of us are not as much a reflection of those people and places that are in nearest physical proximity but rather in nearest emotional and intellectual proximity to us.

The Internet is exciting exactly because it so obviously enables and further enhances these existing social local realms brought about by earlier technologies—mail, telegraph, telephone, etc. while encouraging a more diverse array of new virtual localities to emerge (read: the long tail). I think this is a very, very good thing, but there’s more to the story.

I think it’s fair to take look at socoloco as a culturally realized Virtual Reality 1.0. Remember when talking about VR was still cool and everyone was noodling on the hot question, “but, how do we get our bodies into this computer”? I’d assert that we’ve finally gotten over that questions and we’re taking what we can get, flesh and bones be damned.

Isn’t “Web 2.0” the mark in time of a renewed optimism, leaving behind the hesitation and questions and turning-over a certain amount of our lives to the many charms of virtuality?

So I have to ask:

What about the local local, the earth, as in dirt and trees, and our dear bodies which surely won’t ever translate into electrical impulses over the wire? Isn’t some of the current urgency to address long standing environmental issues a corollary to the increased awareness and pace of adopting a virtual center to our lives?

Craigslist is a marketplace for materiality, stuff and bodies. That’s the real local bodies, stuff and dirt.

I’ve taken a small grant this winter to help our local community build a ride sharing web app. Our neighborhood is 30 miles North of Taos, NM I work from my home office and have to drive to town to get groceries, but some drive to work on a daily basis. None of us like to burn all that gas just for ourselves so if we can share a trip into town it’s always better.

That’s a local problem and I’m anxious to see what I can learn through it about using the net to better enable something right here on my own dirt. I’ll let you know how it goes.

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