We Are Local: Digitally Curating Urban Wanderlust

The We Are Local project is an experiment in collaborative ethnography about social media and social media practices. Unlike other blogs written by multiple authors, We Are Local’s contributors are documenting how social media impacts their day-to-day lives by documenting in as much detail as possible how they use or do not use social media in their social lives. There are no experts of social media at We Are Local. Our claim is simply this: the best way to make claims about the larger implications of social media and culture is to document and understand the relationship between the two on a micro-level and extrapolate from there.

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The ‘5 on Social’ Questions:

‘5 on Social’ are guerrilla style interviews with random people in random cities about social media and their social media practices. The authors of We Are Local will ask the following five questions of their interview subjects. Subjects cannot have the questions explained to them, only repeated. They may only ask ‘Yes or No’ questions of the We Are Local author interviewing them.

1. Please define social media.

2. Do you participate in social media? If so, how often?

3. Does social media affect your decision making process when deciding your social activities (e.g., where to go eat, what to do, what brands to buy, etc)? If so, how?

4. How do you determine if the content you’re reading on a website is legitimate? (i.e., is it ‘fact or crap’?)

5. How do you determine if the content on a website is written by an authority or expert?

11.08.09