Filed under: Justice | Leave a Comment
Tags: athlete's village, bc place roof, bc place roof fiasco, gordon campbell, gordon campbell resigns, olympic village, olympic village receivership, vancouver, vancouver politics
But I probably should, for the practice.
140 characters is about all I manage these days.
Filed under: Authenticity | Leave a Comment
On Monday my best friend Tanya called me from Switzerland to tell me something distressing: her mom no longer thinks she’s Indian. Tanya wants to get married in Delhi next September to her fiancé Aris, who is ethnically Indian but was adopted by Swiss parents when he was a baby. Her mom is now opposed to this plan, telling Tanya that since she is marrying a (to her) non-Indian, for love and has lived with him before marriage, she is no longer Indian and therefore not entitled to a wedding in Delhi. What Tanya was calling to ask me was: what does it mean to be Indian? Is she still Indian, and therefore entitled to an Indian wedding, or not?
This is the context in which I gravitated to the poem “Romantic” by Armand Garnet Ruffo. Though it deals with the question of “Indian-ness” in a completely different sense, the issues of performativeness versus authenticity are similar. Ruffo’s poem asks the question: is romanticization okay?
Filed under: Authenticity, Multiculturalism | Leave a Comment
Tags: archibald belaney, armand garnet ruffo, grey owl, romanticization
“An antipathy, however mild, to foreignness is indispensable to the creed of localism, which seeks to make our economic worlds more intelligible by shrinking them”
~ Kelefa Sanneh “Fast bikes, slow food, and the workplace wars“
Filed under: Institutions | Leave a Comment
Finding meaning online
(Cross-posted on The Mark)
Right now, technology is changing the game for traditional media in the same way that it is for governments and businesses – the internet has reshaped our expectations about convenience, immediacy, interactivity, responsiveness, “interestingness,” cost, etc. In some ways this is a problem (are our expectations unreasonable?) but in other ways, it’s potentially quite beneficial (we should have much higher expectations for our media – and our democracy – and we can collaborate together to realize those expectations in ways that weren’t possible before).
It’s not simply that the mail is being “replaced” by the internet – it’s that our understanding of communication is so different that mail doesn’t even make sense to many of us anymore. But it takes time for even the most savvy of online service providers to adjust to these shifts and capitalize on them.
Google took some strides to seize the potential of email with Gmail – which classifies email threads as “conversations,” moving away from the outdated metaphor of letters – but it will only be with the launch of Google Wave that we’ll really see email become a conversation by taking advantage of the potential for real-time interaction that the internet allows (complete with the ability to interrupt each other).
Adapting successfully to the new paradigm will require a great degree of abstract thinking, an ability to understand your business as fulfilling needs rather than creating a product, and a willingness to meet those needs in whatever way makes the most sense given the current state of technology and society. If media outlets had been more savvy, there never would have been a Google – newspapers would have realized more quickly that their role as arbiters and classifiers of information required them to be the earliest and best adopters of the internet. That wasn’t what happened, obviously.
But just because big institutions have always been terrible at this kind of innovation is no reason to assume they can’t pull it off. The good news for traditional media providers is that, if they can find a way to become more nimble, there are still lots of opportunities to get in on the shift while it’s still happening and to offer something new that capitalizes on these changes in a way nothing else has yet. For many consumers, online media is just like real-life media with the addition of flashing happy faces and dancing monkeys. There’s still plenty of opportunity to show these people that the online world has new, different, and desirable things to offer. But what?
Filed under: Digital divide, Institutions | Leave a Comment
Tags: Digital divide, mainstream media, media concentration, online media
The Twitter storm around the riots following the Iranian elections is sure to be seen as Twitter’s real coming-out party. But – what the hell is Twitter, really? How does it work, and does it really matter?
This will be easier to understand if you’ve actually seen Twitter, so check out the stream of Twitter messages on Iran (often called a feed) on Twitter right now.
This is how Twitter mattered for those in Iran and outside – even if I’ve never met you, and I’m in Vancouver and you’re in Tehran, or we’re both in Tehran but a few kilometres apart, you can send me a 140 character message. How? By putting what’s called a hashtag (simply a few words with the pound sign in front of it) into your message (called a “tweet”) using Twitter on your cell phone. So, if I’m on Twitter I can watch every single message being sent using the #iranelection hashtag, and get some idea of what’s going on (if I’m good at filtering things – when I checked yesterday there were more than a thousand messages, some only tangentially related, every few minutes). Or I might want to send a message that says “Riot police approaching Tehran university. Stay away #iranelection” or “Riot police approaching Tehran university. Send reinforcements. #iranelection.”
There really is no other way to enable a vast number of people who don’t know each other (or even those who do) to communicate in this immediate fashion, simply based on a common concern.The potential this creates to organize is wholly new.
Twitter is also important because it’s mobile – because you can use it on your cell phone it’s more difficult for government to shut down or control.
Beyond the immediate benefits of the technology for people on the ground in Tehran, here’s how I see the use of Twitter having been important during this time:
Continue reading ‘What you need to understand about the riots in Iran and Twitter’
Filed under: Digital divide, Institutions, Justice | Leave a Comment
Tags: #iranelection, iran elections, iranian election, iranian elections twitter, iranian riots, net neutrality, riots in iran, twitter in iran
(cross-posted on The Mark)
When I first started my current job as an Online Community Facilitator, someone in his 60s said to me, “I understand why op-eds matter; I just don’t think that a blog matters.”
This shocked me. I thought it was obvious to everyone that traditional media was rapidly losing the competition with online media. If an op-ed matters, then a well-written blog matters (though on any given day I might argue that neither of them matters).
But the shift to digital culture has been so huge that it has opened up a massive generation gap – a point brought home to me again by the reaction of most of my over-40 colleagues and friends to the imminent demise of CanWest. The shock and anxiety they feel – even those who despise media concentration and everything CanWest stands for – puzzles me.
I guess this is because I can’t remember those halcyon days when newspapers were honest and true and exposed the corruption at the root of our society, creating a modern acropolis. I assume that those days existed, because lots of people (philosopher Jurgen Habermas, for instance) say they did. But for all of my adult life I’ve taken it for granted that if I wanted to know the “real story” about something, I would have to be savvy about cobbling it together myself from different sources. And if I was going to get part of it through a newspaper, I would have to wade through a lot more populist trash and partisan hackery than was often worth my time.
Continue reading ‘The demise of traditional media causes anxiety – maybe it shouldn’t.’
Filed under: Digital divide | Leave a Comment
Tags: canwest, canwest bankruptcy, Digital divide, generation gap, MSM, online media
I’ve talked to a couple parents lately who are either feeling intense anxiety about ensuring they can pay for their children’s post-secondary education, or intense guilt about the fact that that’s not going to be possible for them. I really feel badly for these people, and wish they would stop making themselves crazy, for two reasons:
1) You’re a great parent whether or not you pay for your child’s education.
2) You might be an even better parent if you don’t. Because a) you’ve already been able to give your child many advantages – paying for their post-secondary just creates even greater inequality; b) not having your post-secondary education paid for can teach you a lot of really valuable life skills.
I think the ideal situation for parents and children is to allow your child to keep living at home during post-secondary or, if that doesn’t work for them, billet someone in their room and give them the money (or most of it). This is a very fair and generous arrangement.
But – then won’t your child wind up in tons of debt after graduation? How will he or she pay for tuition and living expenses? Well, by working part-time and during summers. The secret no-one wants to tell you is that it is totally possible to do some extracurriculars, do well in school and work part-time (10 to 15 hours per week) without killing yourself, if you know how to manage your time.
Learning how to not let schoolwork take over your life is really important, both for figuring out time management skills and for your sanity while you’re in school. It’s definitely not easy at all, but it’s do-able and worth doing.
Parents who give their kids a basic living allowance or a place to live and encourage them to work are (I swear) doing their kids a favour. And probably making themselves a lot more sane – something kids should support. But aside from the parental sanity and character-building arguments, I actually think the best reason to do this is the fairness argument – if you care about a more economically equal world, you have to be willing to forego giving your child some of the monetary advantages you might be able to give them.
This completely goes out the window for people who have any kind of serious emotional challenges or learning disabilities. Or Americans – who should consider sending their children to school in Canada anyways.
Filed under: Justice | Leave a Comment
Tags: equality, parenting, post-secondary education
According to Heidegger (as I interpret him from On Being Authentic by Charles Guignon) it’s neither – it’s more like a political commitment:
To ‘become who you are,’ as Heidegger sees it, is to identify what really matters in the historical situation in which you find yourself and to take a resolute stand on pursuing those ends. Through resoluteness and commitment, life comes to have a cumulativeness and directedness, and it thereby achieves a kind of lived temporal continuity Heidegger calls ‘constancy’ and ‘steadfastness.’ Moreoever, since the projects you can take over are all inherited from the historical culture into which you are thrown, to take a stand on what matters is always at the same time to be engaged in the shared undertaking (Heidegger calls it the destiny) of a larger community. For Heidegger, then, authenticity is found to have [a] sort of irreducible social dimension …(On Being Authentic, p. 134)
Of all the different conceptions of authenticity, I find the narrative one the most compelling: that creating your life is much like creating a story, with different components that may seem fragmented but are related to one another by common themes and causal explanation. (This is in contrast to the postmodern account, which sees our different identities and roles as an unorderable flux.) And of all the narrative conceptions of authenticity — Guignon mentions Nietzsche, Heidegger, Charles Taylor and Alasdair Macintyre — I find Heidegger’s the most persuasive. Much more persuasive than Nietzsche’s, which focuses on the artistry of creating a narrative self and imparting “style” to your life. I know that in my own personal experience the more I try to focus on the “style” of my life, the easier it is for me to get lost in others’ notions of what’s aesthetically pleasing, modern, avant-garde, sophisticated, even “cool.” But those times when I try to focus my thought and action on what’s truly important do feel like a rising above, or a deepening, of my own personal experience. Though I suppose some marriage of the two conceptions might also work (or I [and Guignon] might be giving Nietzsche really short shrift here).
I really like the way the social aspect plays out in Heidegger’s conception – I had already been dwelling on it a lot when Stephen Epperson, Unitarian Church guru, spoke last Sunday about the “thread of self, and the fabric of community into which it is woven.” Sharing a commitment to what’s most important seems the best way to weave a strong self into a strong community.
But then, this brings up the question of how to decide what that most important thing actually is…
Filed under: Authenticity | Leave a Comment
Tags: charles guignon, heidegger, nietzsche, on being authentic, unitarian church
reilly reads 