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.