Description:

This book examines outdoor flyers and online forums in New York City neighborhoods. Residents are brimming with local knowledge, from the trivial to the empowering. However, people are currently limited in their ability to communicate with their collective neighborhood and as a result, this wealth of knowledge remains largely untapped. Two forms of communication provide promising improvements. Both outdoor flyers and online forums enable individuals to reach out to a large population in public space. By taking a closer look at how people use these systems, this book examines local information networks so that better spaces can be made for neighbors to collectively communicate, self-organize, and become effective agents in their communities. Research includes photographs of outdoor flyers and documentation of online forums in the Lower East Side, Chinatown, and Cobble Hill. This book also presents an experiment with intriguing results!