I have a new journal article published today in Media, Culture and Society, titled ‘Roots and fields: excursions through place, space, and local in hyperlocal media’. I’m really pleased to have something appear in MCS. Before I became more immersed in media and cultural studies, it was the one journal I really looked to as embodying the field a whole – and I still feel it does, even with a broadened awareness of the field. The abstract for the article (which can be accessed at Sage OnlineFirst) is below. The official version requires a subscription, of course. The accepted manuscript version is freely accessible via BIROn, Birkbeck’s open-access repository.

Roots and fields: excursions through place, space, and local in hyperlocal media

Scott Rodgers

Abstract
In 2012, UK charity Nesta announced Destination Local, a program focused on future developments in ‘hyperlocal media’ based on location-based technologies. The program’s first round funded an experimental portfolio of 10 small projects. In this article, I present vignettes drawn from walking interviews with four of the project leaders, putting these into dialogue with phenomenological and practice-centered media theory, as well as growing interests in the geographies of media. My argument is that practices of so-called hyperlocal media should be understood via a phenomenological duality. On one hand, as activities rooted in place: conducting media work though situated environments. Yet, on the other hand, as inhabitations of field spaces: geographically dispersed social and technical worlds. This analysis suggests we step back in order to consider the conceptualization of place, space, and the local itself in studies of ‘hyperlocal’ as an emergent form of media production.

Keywords
digital media, field theory, hyperlocal media, journalism, local media, phenomenology, place and space, walking interviews