Paying attention, digital media, and community-based critical GIS

Abstract

New web-based architectures and capacities for digital storage have made online social interactions more significant, discursively and materially. Increasingly, these media-centric shifts toward the online and the interactive have enabled for-profit and nonprofit organizations to capture the attention of potential customers and constituents through social and spatial media. In research on the everyday information- and data-practices of community-based organizations, websites and their mobile applications such as Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Pinterest are examined as the emerging media toolset to build sustained connections to funders, constituents, and other members. These technologies and these new pressures around their utilization have made the daily work of nonprofits more complex. As the landscapes of digital media continually shift their interfaces, protocols, and membership settings (including privacy configurations), I suggest that this new normal – persistent change – presents challenges for collective memory and the attention-work of community-based organizations. Taking up and responding to concerns around the implications of digital information technologies on memory and culture, this paper highlights struggles over externalization as significant to the everyday work of collective action.