I discovered the concept of the hyperlocal as I researched social media which focused on community identity, typically through connections to geophysical locations, a particular region, neighborhood, or town, for example. Simply defined hyperlocal is what it sounds like: hyper as in linked, and local as in location.

As a metaphor, neighborhood evokes community, familiarity, shared space and often an assumption of shared values. Due to how easily and quickly groups emerge and dissolve via the Internet and our increasingly mobile society, we have made the concept of neighborhood into an icon, a holder of shared values. In doing so, a sense of nostalgia regarding neighborhoods emerges as we yearn for a place to connect with those who have something in common with us. Place easily becomes the focus of this yearning.

With today’s digital possibilities, society is not limited to geographic proximity for social connection or participation. In lieu of proximity, we rely on technology to help us construct our collective identities by trying to recreate connections to geophysical locations. Social media sites work as an “unbounded community,” in which my geographic location is only one way to connect me to other social media users.

The digital neighborhood, in the case of place bloggers, begins within a literal neighborhood and moves outward. And like many digital neighborhoods, place bloggers often focus on what journalists call hyperlocal content

When focusing on hyperlocal content, the relevance of the information becomes paramount in order to avoid what Steven Johnson calls the “pothole paradox.” The idea is that the pothole in front of your home or apartment is a big deal to you, but your friends a few blocks over couldn’t care less.

The connections users make with one another in social media are typically based on proximity, either social or physical because users are no longer residing in online spaces and then moving offline but rather moving between the two in a myriad of ways, most significantly creating web presences online for their geophysical location as a way to further construct and represent their collective identities.

In a reputation economy, information about other users’ reputation spreads quickly so that if you violate other users’ trust, it will affect your reputation throughout entire networks of people. Whether it is conscious or not, those providing advice and generating other content for social media are getting something out of the process as they construct their collective identities.