April 30, 2007 at 8:05 am
(Uncategorized)
A phrase in a NY Times story about mobile phone social networking methods made me chuckle:
But for many Twitter users, text messages have become a form of self-expression and public performance. They are flinging messages that would seem to be of slight interest to anyone: notifications that they are online, or listening to music, or going shopping, or even performing activities of a historically more discreet nature.
(The emphasis is mine.) I could include the context but context is rarely any fun.
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April 23, 2007 at 11:51 pm
(Culture)
Lost in the noise about greenhouse gas emissions, high fuel prices and alternative fuels is something really key to me to understanding the whole energy crisis (whether it be real or perceived.)
Cars, in the U.S., have made a huge impact in our lifestyle. In some ways, perhaps, it is for the good. Our idea of neighbors has expanded. To this point, my wife and I just drove 2,000 some miles through 11 states is the South and came across a number of variations on American culture (as well as flora and fauna.)
Yet largely our concept 50 years ago of where cars would take us was flawed and we will continue to pay the price for these flaws for decades to come regardless of whether those mistakes are corrected now. And while corrections to this vision are being made they are often too little. The car needs to be deemphasized in our lifestyle and not just for environmental reasons.
My parents live in a neighborhood that was built in the mid-1950’s. I have to think that the planners of this age, high on the possibilities of a car in every garage, really believed that we would soon stop walking anywhere. The sidewalks in this neighborhood are inhospitable. They are barely wide enough for one person and are right next to the street. While older suburban neighborhoods might lack sidewalks entirely, neighborhoods in Denver continued to be built with the half-sidewalk driveway curb at least through the 1980’s. Only recently did neighborhood planning start taking pedestrians into account again.
Walking in these neighborhoods isn’t impossible and plenty of people do it but it seems to serve a different function. It’s much more utilitarian walking. And while newer neighborhoods (such as Stapleton or Lowry in Denver or the one we live in in Lexington) have brought the sidewalk back, half a century or utilitarian walking has made walking for leisure almost awkward.
I’m really glad that the “city center” concept has taken hold to replace the mall but as I’ve written before, it’s still incomplete. Driving a few miles to get to the shopping center doesn’t make the walking any less awkward. The next step in the evolution is probably smaller, more distributed shopping areas. Back to the corner store. E-commerce could make this happen. And could you blame me for welcoming the demise of the bland utilitarian strip malls?
Driving to work will still be a problem though. Maybe existing suburban neighborhoods drawn along the lines that people would drive to the grocery store, to work, to school can be upgraded to include the smaller commercial districts. Yet people in spread-out cities are still going to need to get to work. As someone who travels 40 minutes each way to a town of less than 10,000 people to get to work, this idea preoccupies me. Can mass transit really solve these problems?
I’d like to think that if enough people *had* to use it, it would eventually serve everyone, even people in the sprawl, better than it does now. Higher volume will lead to more frequent stops; with less traffic and good design I think a good hub-and-spoke system could often come close to current commute times. Yet that freedom is still seductive if not always essential.
I’m no great fan of cars and haven’t been for some time. Two weeks ago, I would have said that I’d feel safer if there were no cars than I would if there were no guns. I’d stick to that statement. Yet I’m also an American. I love the freedom the car gives me. Yesterday morning, one of my wife’s co-workers lost her sister to a car accident. She was the passenger in a car returning from Cincinnati where she and the driver attended a Reds game. It was late and he fell asleep at the wheel. This couple was about the same age as us. Less than 24 hours later, my wife and I made that same fairly routine drive. It’s a little…creepy. There is always that gamble we’re taking. The number of people I know who have died in car crashes is exactly equal to the number of people I know who’ve died from gunshot wounds. Both are far less than the number of people I’ve known who have died from natural causes. But someone who was a high school student in Canton, OH in the late 90’s might know more car accident victims, someone from Denver’s Park Hill neighborhood may have known more gun crime victims from 1993 alone. It’s all anectdotal.
Yet how can we allow something to make our lives more expensive, to decrease the overall quality of life, to make our lives however much less safe, and do so so willingly? Car culture may be quintessentially American but so are so many of these things that it has the capability of destroying if we let it, if we start answering these questions too late.
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April 19, 2007 at 10:40 pm
(Science/Technology)
David Pogue’s review of the Sandisk Sansa indicates that someone, at least, is getting it over at Yahoo. Slowly, but slowly, things are headed in the right direction: someday we may yet have an immense catalog of songs available to us wherever we go. The flaws are probably enough to keep me from purchasing one right now. But they’ve definitely piqued my interest and, importantly, they seem to have focused on the right things which means they are already better suited to provide this “future of music” than Microsoft is with its Zune player.
Something I read over on Alternet a couple of weeks ago really interested me. It was a column by Bob Ostertag, a musician advocating the online availability of music. Although the scope of the article was greater than this, one of the things Ostertag pointed out struck me. He bemoaned the way people listen to music in the iPod age. It has become background music–people pledge some allegiance to what they’re listening to but no longer take it seriously. It’s possible to listen to a single song and not an entire album. Our listening opportunities have changed and it’s no longer always expedient to listen to a whole album. This is too bad!
The portable music player does change the experience. It’s too easy to change albums, there is no messing with album sleeves or even CD cases. The attention span is gone. I know I only listen to the most solid albums as complete works. So is the experience changed? And does that change result cheapening of the experience? Yes, for some music it does. But connoisseurs will know the difference and they will be the ones listening to those sets anyway.
3 Comments
April 11, 2007 at 10:36 pm
(Media)
It’s only 2007 but Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi has a great column (via Alternet) on what we can expect to see in the next 18 months as far as election journalism.
It’s too bad this R-rated piece probably won’t make many Social Studies classes. But it makes some great points and tears apart everybody’s favorite newspaper of record. It’s great to see this. I was really starting to wonder if I just wasn’t paying attention. It seemed to me that the Democratic primary was going to be decided by answering whether America were less ready for a Black President or a female one. Besides gender and race, virtually the only thing I know about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is on which side of the aisle they sit when the Senate is in session. I know perhaps a little more about Bill Richardson and Dennis Kucinich but probably not enough to make an informed choice.
Is it too late for a mashup to help us now?
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April 2, 2007 at 10:47 pm
(Personal)
You may be wondering why I’ve changed the look of my blog back to the old, slightly-modified-Kubrick theme that I had been running. Well, partly, it was bound to happen. The new theme just didn’t work properly all the time. But there’s another reason.
I’ve been working (obsessively working, if you’d ask Mel) on a plugin that will allow the user to display photos from a SmugMug RSS feed in the sidebar of a blog running WordPress. This is an extension of the addition of the “photos” page–I just wanted something a little more prominent. It would be easy enough to do something that I could modify in the php code but I wanted something user friendly. Something that showed a selectable number of random photos. I had big dreams. And I’m getting there.
If you’re lucky, you can see the results (likely still in interim form) in the sidebar of this blog. But my hope is to expand it. Today, district30. Tomorrow, the blogosphere!
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