Siberian Federal University

The article is devoted to the importance of digital communication in the contemporary city. In comparison to the popular macro approaches (“smart city”, “media city” by S. McQuire), this text focuses on the micro- scale of urban locality. The first part describes how modern technologies via the integration of GIS and social media contributes to the transference of the image of locality into the public domain, forming its virtual and discursive “twin”. The second part presents the results of a three-year monitoring of a set of neighborhood online chats in housing estates of Irkutsk. The highlighted digital practices demonstrate the importance of instant-messenger communication for community building. The “digital” is presented as a communication field in which the materiality of the locality, its inhabitants and external observers are interwoven with each other