Network Localities : Identity , Place , and Digital Media

Addressing debates about culture and globalization , this paper looks at how identity and place is produced through and within digital media infrastructures. “Network locality” describes affiliation that spans geography through media technology, but is grounded in concrete places, practices, and material relations. The contrast between global flows and local practice and identity is the wrong starting point for approaching new media technologies. Rather than being a univocal force of globalization, digital media is both produced by and productive of localized social relations and interests. Two cases of network localization around age-cohort identity are presented: SeniorNet, a network of computer-using senior citizens, and fans of the computer game SimCity 2000. The picture that emerges is that locality—as defined place as well as meaningful context—remains robust, but the players that contribute to it can be impersonal, technological, and spatially dispersed. Denaturalized from association with geographic place, locality is unbounded and dynamic, an ongoing partial achievement that never exhausts possibilities for affiliation and solidarity. At the same time, it is grounded in particular social practices, materialized texts, placed infrastructures and architectures. All localities are ultimately hybrids of geographically and technologically placed connection.