The Discourse of Digital Locality

I am at my desk at 1:00 in the morning.  I teach first year composition at 8:00 in the morning.  The pigeons are nesting on my air condition unit and shitting all over my deck.  Normally, I'd scare them off, but its storming and I have an amazing sense of my own guilt.  

There, I have located myself in more ways in than necessary.  Despite all the extras, the fact is that I am at my desk and the pigeons are on the air conditioner (wall-unit by the way--the outside part).  But it is this awareness of the relationship between myself and other agents around (the closest are the pigeons for sake of example) my physical location that seems to be creating a new discourse of locality.  

In Mathew Honan's article in Wired 17.02, titled "I Am Here," he explicitly calls to attention this new discourse.  The article focus on smart phone applications that run on GPS based systems.  So, for instance, there is an application that allows you instant message someone in the vicinity who happens to be logged into the same app.  There is one in which lists Wikipedia articles about local attractions and histories.  There is another that shows the twitter feeds of everyone in your current zip-code.  The point is our locality is now some discursive action that is broadcast to agents in the local discourse community.  

But there are some interesting aspects of this yet to be explored.  For instance, Honan was constantly updating his location on various apps and social networking cites.  He comments "This is new territory, and there's no established etiquette or protocol" (74).  So essentially we are seeing the birth of discourse or a genre within a larger discourse.  I guess this somewhat similar to the birth of text messaging and the formation of text-speak.  Now the genre is fairly entrenched.  As portals to this new genre become cheaper (smart phones) I think we will begin to see standard acts of behavior like we saw with the genesis of social networking sites.  This will be an interesting thing to follow if you like genre theory, discourse analysis, and information architecture.

This last one is particularly interesting because we are putting out tons of data by just having a GPS based app read our location and turn into communicable information.   

So, since I do have a Smart Phone, I am locating myself at my computer, on my blog, next to the pigeons who are shitting on patio.  And to be an agent, you gotta be located.