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Supermax prisons have proliferated in the United States since their contemporary introduction in the early 1980s and have developed a more recent trajectory in the war prison. Drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben and Zygmunt Bauman as well as ethnographic research in Washington state prisons, this article considers the internal dynamics and history of the supermax prison in terms of bare life, exception, indifference, and “choice.” Contradictory relationships within and around the supermax are contextualized in terms of the extreme and technologically sophisticated methods that make up contemporary incarceration.

The current study explores the ambiguity of accounting technique in the context of a historical study of the Canadian Indian Department under the direction of Deputy Superintendent D.C. Scott at the beginning of the 20th century. Starting from the work of Bauman and his commentators, we argue that modernity viewed as a set of practices and thought patterns, facilitates bureaucratic constructions of the “Indian problem” In turn, this cultural milieu and bureaucratic construction operated as an ideological circle, encouraging the use of accounting techniques of governance that permitted both the distancing of bureaucrats from indigenous peoples and the downplaying of other vantage points. However, as our analysis highlights, numerical re‐presentations also provided the tools and rhetorical spaces for challenges to government policy.

The purpose of this paper is to interrogate the potential for hyper‐local news websites to support and sustain peripheral rural communities by extending and developing the public sphere(s) in which they engage locally and globally.

Theoretical understandings of communicative spaces, monitorial citizenship and “liquid life” and journalism developed by Jurgen Habermas, Michael Schudson, Zygmunt Bauman and Mark Deuze inform this pilot study of a hyper‐local project undertaken by a UK media corporation. Data sets comprising documentation; news‐website content; interviews with journalists; “knowledge café” exploration of audience interactions and questionnaires are analysed to identify themes and sub‐themes in the production and use of media content.

The hyper‐local project was found to have been put in place without engaging effective involvement of the community concerned and the initial conceptualisation, predicated on assumptions of an inward focus for the community, did not recognise the importance of communicative networks which both supported sustainability within the group and situated that community in wider social, cultural, economic and media dimensions. As such the project tended to reinforce, or at least, not mitigate, the community's geographical isolation.

This is a small‐scale pilot project exploring new forms of media/community engagement and, while the results can be regarded as indicative, further research is needed to investigate hyper‐local developments in a wider contextual field.

The paper addresses an important but little‐researched emergent issue: “hyper‐local”. It explores in detail some of the complexities that are beginning to be theorised in broad terms and extends understandings of local‐level practices and processes.