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Understanding the Key Idea

To understand this project, you should also read the entry for "Glocalization" from the Ideas site and follow its links to see examples of the use of this concept on the Web.

Choosing a Topic

In this project, you will create a Web site that focuses on some "glocalizable"aspect of Duluth, Lake Superior, The Northshore or some locale in Minnesota. Each of your projects will develop a set of Web pages covering some specific, local place, product, regular event, phenomenon, or historical topic for an audience who will never physically visit the area.

Defining an Audience and their Interests

Why would audiences beyond Minnesota, the Upper Midwest, or even the US borders find any value in a Web site focusing on a local area topic? In fact, localness has new relevance, even as the forces of globalization create what one critic has called "McWorld." For instance, chrysanthemum enthusiasts are no longer limited to participation in local or regional gatherings, or the occasional national convention. Thanks to the reach of the media, most recently the Web, such enthusiasts are able to "visit" a huge variety of local Chrysanthemum sites all across the world, both famous and obscure, and communicate with fellow enthusiasts in a "panlocal," rather than generically "global," chrysanthemum culture—what we might call a "chrysanthemumscape." Your site should speak to a similarly conceived scape (as defined on the Ideas site's "glocalization" page).

Imagining the Form and Content

• Depending on your topic and glocal audience, your site will either advance an argument or tell a story—perhaps both simultaneously.
• Since you are designing a Web site, you will develop this argument or narrative not simply in a linear verbal text, but through a combination of words, images, and linked pages (hypertext) that recognizes the more autonomous role played by the user or visitor to the site than that played by the reader of a conventional print-culture document.
• While you want to design in a style appropriate to this more user-oriented medium, you still want to use the attributes of the medium to get across your agenda (your argument/story).
• The best of these sites will also give the audience a means to participate in this "scape," and reasons to return to the site in the future.
• Since you are local, you should take maximum advantage of your access to develop original materials for your site, including your own text, photographs, and research.
• You should decide, depending on what's appropriate to your topic and audience, if you want to design your site in a corporate, civic or personal "voice." Be consistent, however.
• Take care not to emulate the less sophisticated kinds of Web pages that don't really use the medium fully, but only imitate print discourse, such as the "Future Birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk" site from Riverside, Iowa, which is really just a print article placed on the Web.

Looking at Examples

As we've seen in our review of the term "glocalization," there is a growing consciousness that the local and global can be reconciled, either by customizing (localizing) global topics or products for various audiences/markets, or by publicizing a locale to the world as a symbol, case study, point of origin, "flavor," brand or a commodifiable, "authentic" experience. Indeed, the attraction of the Internet isn't just to escape into the Wide World, but to experience, in some remotely mediated way, the flavor of other locales, cultures and situated individual--a flavor that is somehow already significant to us. The following examples of glocalized topics are presented here not as models of Web design, since some of them are naively done, but to provide ideas for how local topics can connect with non-local audiences:

• Seinfeld's Real New York makes local spots in New York City visitable to the many fans of the sitcom. Mary Tyler Moore Show tour of Minneapolis does something similar for the Twin Cities and fans of the 70s-era show, still seen on TV Land network.
  
• Triple Cycle Theory chronicles the history of the Seattle music scene which spawned bands like Nirvana, Hole, Mudhoney, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden. Click the link on the home page for "history."
  
• Tabasco uses the exotic locale and history of its original home on Avery Island to market its hot sauce.
  
• The New York City nightclub CBGB promotes its (arguable) reputation as the birthplace of punk.
  
• The LBJ and Lincoln home sites offer history or Americana buffs a chance to experience the landscapes and cultures that shaped these presidents.
• Numerous sites offer virtual tours meant to provide educational value, such as the Cedar River Watershed Virtual Tour in Seattle, WA, or the Plimoth Plantation Tour in Plymouth, MA.
• Members of groups are bound by their histories, and the places where this history unfolded often take on a sacred status, even for those visiting them only virtually. You probably need to know the history of the Mormon Church to follow this Tour of the Carthage (IL) Jail, but for the "Saints" its a compelling experience to see where it actually happened.
  

Be sure to read the entry for "Glocalization" from the Ideas site if you haven't already!