hyper and meta

There's a new term flying about newsmedia companies: "hyperlocal." The idea here is that in order for news organizations to maintain their value, they need to generate news that's intimately relevant -- to you, your street, your neighborhood, or your circle of friends and co-horts.

It's an interesting term. I rather like it. Particularly the "hyper" part.

But I have another bit of trendy jargon to offer: why not "metalocal?"

In the words of @IanSohn, "With technology, Is Chicago-London really any further apart than Kensington-Notting Hill?" The answer, Ian, is deceptively simple. It depends upon who you know and where they are.

Distance is mutable. Althrough Ian is in Chicago and I am in London, I feel closer to Ian because his tweets present a meandering narrative of his daily life, thoughts, and experiences. Meanwhile, his long form blog offers opportunities to delve deeper into his ideas and perceptions. It helps that Ian is a very active participant in emergent, real time media.

It matters not that he's in Chicago; I have more of a sense of his world than I do of the neighbor down the street. Metalocal.

And yet. The other night I was at a charity committee meeting. I'm a new member of this committee. Committees are fun. You meet people you wouldn't otherwise. In my case, I met a neighbor. And actual, live-a-few-doors-down-from-me neighbor. And I was delighted. We are similarly proud of the quality of our local Indian restaurant. We share a similar opinion of the greengrocers across from my flat (they need to upgrade their offering.) He's been here longer and was able to point out aspects of the neighborhood about which I didn't know. Bits of gossip, really. Hyperlocal.

I would suggest that proximity is a mind-and-body thing.

Metalocal is mind-oriented. The issues that matter to me and my cohorts, in real time. Is Andy's (Crouch End) wife in labor yet? Is Ian (Chicago) still on Dad duty? What's going down with Prop 8 in San Francisco?

Hyperlocal is more body-oriented. What's the weather going to be like after lunch? Why were they starting construction at 7 in the morning? What happened to the boy who my neighbors and I watched the paramedics cut out of his car after the auto accident the day before yesterday?

When I first relocated to London, I found it hard to maintain a feeling of closeness with my friends back in San Francisco, LA, and New York. I couldn't see the finer grain of their lives, their commutes, their dinners, their Sunday walks. But that was before Facebook, Flickr, et al. The cliche "out of sight, out of mind" comes to mind. It's not that they were totally out of my thoughts -- I was acutely aware of missing them -- it's that I didn't feel connected. The importance of physical proximity was clear to me then.

It's different now. Certainly, physical space matters, we live in physical bodies after all, at least for now and the near future.

But considering that the interface between ourselves and the world our bodies inhabit is sensorial, it seems obvious to predict that as communication technology itself becomes more multisensorial, in real time, the feeling of proximity with those who are far away will continue to increase. Those Flickr pics and YouTube videos and "let's make a random album cover on Facebook" virals and real-time thoughts zipping around the planet really are bringing us all closer together.

What does this mean for freaked-out news agencies? It means that more news will matter to more people than ever before. Meaningful news. Some big stories, some very granular bits of in-the-moment info. How this news gets generated and distibuted is another story altogether. But the need for both hyperlocal and metalocal news has never been greater.