Being a HyperLocal in the Global Village

The allure of the 'Global Village' is not difficult to discern: an easily-traversed space where residents all know one another and keep an eye out for each others interests. Popular conceptions of the Global Village might be likened to a small country town where the inbred yokels are replaced with Web-conversant cosmopolitans. All the conversational joys of the small country town, but with topics of conversation which extend beyond football.

Yet in many ways, the term 'Global Village' is counter-intuitive: designed for web-interaction, it seeks to provide a sense of security against the unknown dangers of darkest Internet. There might be a plethora of creeps in the vastness of the Internet, but there will be no strangers in the Global Village.

It is the tension between the vast Internet and the intimate Global Village that we now often see played out on Blogs. When starting a blog, one is very soon confronted by a simple question: If one can blog about anything, does that mean one will blog about everything?

Happily, the answer is just as simple: 'no'.

The newly-born blogger who finds themselves alone in the Internet soon learns that a blog must first of all have boundaries to provide focus. For boffins, this is an easy task. One of the first Great Things of the Internent was its ability to permit disparate tech-heads to come together to develop better, more efficient, more useful, and more enjoyable ways of using the Internet.

But what of those whose primary interest lies beyond the abstract? Who are fascinated foremost by what is happening outside their door, in their corporeal neighbourhood? Who want to subject CorpoReality to their creative mechanism, and inject the product of their labours back into Virtual Reality?

The HyperLocals are coming: those who want to put online their offline locale.

Some want to use their locale as the conceptual region in which they will explore a specific interest. Some simply want to reinterpret and recreate their locale.

This blog will seek to pursue the former, albiet with occasional forays into the latter. This blog primarily addresses community developments within the HyperLocality of the City of Moreland. It hopes to be half watchdog, half investigative journalism, half advocate, and half flaneurism.

But mostly it hopes to be about Moreland, the people who live here, and the barrows they push.

Let's see what we can find in Moreland.