Last week, I was biking from downtown up to the university. At one intersection, I saw someone I know driving and gave a wave. I passed someone else waiting at a bus stop, and had a brief chat. Then in the parking lot of the university, a third acquaintance and another brief exchange.
The last few times I’ve gone to the grocery store I’ve run into people I know. Fellow volunteers, a former landlord, a friend of my parents. Not deep friendships, but friendly “hellos” and a brief update on what we’ve been up to.
This is the sort of extended network that can only come out of actually setting down roots in a place. These are people that I’ve met at different points of my life, or have met through other friends and family.
I’ve been having this sorts of encounters more and more, and it’s a pleasant, albeit unexpected side effect of making the decision to live here and stay here as much as possible. Maybe you can get that in new cities if you’re extremely social, but even then you’re not going to have the same number of mutual acquaintances or shared history.
I recently saw a quote from Christopher Hitchens that’s said to go “A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realisation that you can’t make old friends.”
This applies to people and it applies to places, too. At a certain point globetrotting gets in the way of being rooted. Historically, human beings have been rooted. There just wasn’t a choice. But over the last hundred years or so, things have altered to the point that it’s basically a rite of passage to spend at least some time overseas. I did it. And I liked it, but I saw a darker side to it, too.
People who flitted from place to place without ever setting down roots or actually having real stakes in any particular part of the world. In extreme cases, they substituted actually DOING something with their lives with simply changing cities or countries every few years. Because their locale had changed, they felt like they had changed.
Don’t get me wrong– there’s lots to be said for travelling. And there are important purposes served by travellers who build up extended networks. But one of my biggest pet peeves is the notion that simply by buying a plane ticket and staying in a hostel you’ve become a better person. Worse is the person who feels like they’ve done something simply by moving to a bigger city, regardless of what they’ve actually DONE there.
I think we’re getting some pushback on that front. As travel becomes more routine, the mystique wears off and we start to question what the point is. One of my favourite TV shows right now is Parks and Recreation, and an emerging theme is the importance of working for your community, not just yourself. In one of the episodes, the central character is offered a job in another city. In a discussion about whether to take it, she’s told “you’ll get a lot of job offers in your life but you only have one hometown.” I don’t know if it’s OK to have a good portion of your philosophy summed up in a low-rated half-hour sitcom, but there it is.
Travel is great. But so is having a home. The problem, as I said, is that the more you travel or change locations, the less of a home you have. I hope to travel more. But at the moment I’m investing my time into having a home, as well. I want my city to succeed. I want to have family nearby, and I want to have old friends, and I want to have a strong, local, extended network, as well.
I’ve never understood people who live in a place for years, raise kids there, make friends there and then, upon retirement, move to a community where they know virtually nobody. Maybe it works for them. Maybe it’ll work for me one day, too, as I get older and my views change. But right now I like running into people I know at the grocery store, even if I haven’t had a conversation with them in years. It makes me feel at home.
This morning on Daybreak North we played an interview and live performance from the Arbitrarys. This is a band I’ve been covering back since my days at Over the Edge, but it’s the first time we’ve had them on CBC. It could be the last, too, since they’re about to relocate to eastern Canada. They’ve been such an important part of the Prince George music scene over the last little while that we felt it was important to get them on.
We still have to get the Concerns of Royalty. They’ve played countless shows over the last few years, but we haven’t yet grabbed them. Hopefully we do before their current drummer leaves town. He’s a talented solo musician, too. We also could have done the Delightful Gang, since they are playing their last show this Saturday before various members scatter. Off the top of my head glaring oversights so far also include Cera, Foam Mesh Press and Ceremony, not to mention up-and-comers like Canadian Waste and Wisconsin Dream Guitar. And that’s just in Prince George. There’s a whole stack of artists scattered in Terrace, Quesnel, Fort St John, Smithers and beyond that we simply haven’t managed to get on yet.
Did I mention we feature a musical guest at least once a week?
It’s the same with authors. Every Wednesday, we talk to someone who’s either writing in northern BC or about northern BC. When I found out about this, I thought, “There’s no way there’s enough writing going on here to make this sustainable.” I now have a stack of books by authors that we want to feature but simply haven’t managed to get to yet. It grows every week. Don’t even get me started on poets, short stories, and extended essays. Not to mention musicians and authors who are simply touring through town.
We had to change the way people submit events for our arts announcements so that they would automatically be sorted by date because otherwise there was no way we could properly streamline the process of sorting them. There’s simply too much stuff going on. There are so many interesting stories, people and ideas that we want to get to but have difficulty doing with a mere two-and-half hours a day five days a week to do it in.
I used to hear people say there’s nothing to do in Prince George and get annoyed because if there was nothing to do, why didn’t they go out and make something to do? Now it’s even worse because I see that they don’t even have to make something to do. There’s tons of it. One of the hardest parts of my job is whittling everything there is to do into a few key points to announce on the radio. I almost always feel bad because there’s something I didn’t get to.
Once you scratch the surface you uncover a goldmine of interesting things. Not just here, but anywhere. If a region as sparsely populated as ours can produce this amount of talent I have a hard time believing the rest of the world doesn’t have at least as many stories and subjects to explore. It’s a good problem to have. Certainly better than “There’s nothing to do!”
I want a new personal business card. Here’s my first draft:
Thesis: Google+ comments are primarily noise, Twitter’s lack of “comments” are a built in filter.
I feel like I’ve written about internet things too much lately, and I actually had something else queued up, but this is frankly more interesting to me right now. It’s also timely.
It’s about Google+. Feel free to leave if you’re not interested.
I’m finding Google+ fascinating because it’s the first time I’ve been in at the ground-floor of a new social network. MySpace I came to late and didn’t stick with long, Facebook I joined after some friends were on there, Twitter was before Oprah but after all the early adopters, and Tumblr I only really “got” sometime last year. Google+, in contrast, is only a few weeks old, and it’s fascinating to watch it develop under early users who are both testing it out and re-evaluating existing services. At the core of all this we’re talking design, communication, relationships and human pyschology. Just take a look at some of my bookmarks on the subject if you want to read some very smart people with some very interesting observations about these subjects .
The part I want to talk about here is the emerging “Is Google+ going to kill Twitter?” question, which has come to a head in a post by tech-famous guy Robert Scoble, who wrote about how ever since Google+ came along, Twitter is boring.
He has a number of reasons, including:
On Google+ I can see if what you wrote excited or pissed people off. Why? There are comments right underneath it. As a writer this feedback makes Google+ extremely interesting. Why? Because I can change my behavior if I’m pissing people off, and my ego gets fed when I see 3,000 people commented and said “great post.” I am seeing a LOT of engagement on Google+ where on Twitter I can’t see that.
And it’s true. He gets lots of comments on everything G+ item he posts.
But here’s the thing: most of the comments Robert Scoble gets are junk.
Maybe junk is too harsh a word, but certainly noise. And what I mean by noise is information that is straight up not relevant to anything. Let’s look at Scoble’s Google+ thread wherein he declares how boring Twitter has become.
As of my writing this, there are 386 comments. The one that appears in my stream is from a guy highjacking the thread with a link to his own blog that is only tangentially related to the topic and ends with a “Follow me on Google+” link. If I open the thread, the first comment is “same here”, followed by a guy straight-up advertising some Facebook game he’s made. No relevance to the conversation at all. There are a few decent comments following, but many are along the lines of “I agree.” In other words, things that could have been expressed using a “like,” “+1,” or whatever positive-sentiment button your social network of choice has implemented. Throw in a “dislike” button and you’ve eliminated the need for at least 50% of the comments. And that’s a problem. When so many of the comments are just noise, it cancels out the good ones. The ones that actually add to the quality of the post rather than just clutter it up.
That’s where Twitter excels. If I want to comment on someone else’s Tweet, I need to make the decision to clutter up my own stream with a reply. Not yours. Mine. That means I’m going to consider it a lot more before adding my voice to the sea of “me too’s”! Some (like Scoble) see this as a bad thing because it gets in the way of “instant feedback.” I see it as a positive because it gets in the way of mindless feedback.
I like blog comments. Fred Wilson’s AVC blog consistently gets upwards of one hundred comments, almost all of them worthwhile (he also uses what I think is the best conversation tool out there, Disqus). I have comments enabled on my own blog because I want to give people the opportunity to respond to my writing if they choose to do so. But I don’t crave them. I’d rather get a few quality responses than a hundred junk ones. And I definitely don’t need people highjacking my threads to promo their new Facebook page.
Some people take this a step further. John Gruber and Marco Arment have written about why they don’t include comments in their blogs. And, (I think not coincidentally), they are both active Twitter users. When Twitter started it was a “microblogging service.” In other words, a blog with 140 characters. And Twitter blogs don’t have comments enabled.
Here’s what I mean. If you go to my Google+ profile, you see my stream. And my stream is made up of stuff that I’ve posted, and comments that myself and others have made on things I’ve posted. If I post on someone else’s page, that shows up in THEIR stream. Not mine. So if I start spamming your posts with links to my new Facebook page, that’s a problem for you, not me, because it makes your page look messy without affecting my page at all. I can post a link on hundreds of people’s walls and it doesn’t affect my profile at all. If Google+ were a blog, it’d be one that’s very open to trolls (at the moment).
On Twitter, it’s different. I can’t “comment” on your items. If I want to provide feedback, I have to muddy up MY stream with @ replies. In other words, I have to make my own microblog post, not just comment on yours. So if I want to start promoing my Facebook page by hijacking other people’s comments threads, I need to post the same thing ON MY STREAM over and over and over again. And that’s going to lose me followers. Even if I’m not spamming, I don’t want to bore my own followers with dozens of “right ons!” “yeah!” “me too!” Tweets. If I’m going to say something, I want it to sound at least halfway considered because otherwise, I’m just making noise. And that bores my audience, however small it may be.
Twitter has a perfectly fine set of tools for feedback. If someone likes your Tweet, they can favourite it. If they want to share it they can retweet it, and if they’d like to add to the conversation they can have an @ reply. And in some ways retweets and @ replies are BETTER feedback than comments on Google+ or elsewhere because it means the person likes or at least respects what you have to say enough that they’re willing to quote it to others, not just the echo chamber.
Google+ is emerging as an interesting platform, even if I haven’t quite figured out where it fits into the overall ecosystem. But already I can tell that one of its biggest challenges is filtering the amount of noise it makes. That is not a problem Twitter’s had, and a big part of that is how simple it is: if you consistently enjoy what people have to say in under 140 characters follow them and you’ll see what else they have to say, if you don’t like it unfollow and you’ll not see them again UNLESS someone else you like decides to retweet a quality post. No circles, no comments, and an easy “block” option for mindless spam. It’s a strength, and one they should continue to play into.
Articles linked to in this post:
Google+ has made Twitter boring, here’s what Twitter should do about that by Robert Scoble (G+ thread)
I’ll Tell You What’s Fair by John Gruber
Comments by Marco Arment
See also:
Your Right to Comment Ends at My Front Door by Derek Powazek
Asking Twitter to Commit Suicide With A Google+ Dagger by MG Siegler
So it sounds like Spotify is coming to the United States. If you are neither a music geek nor a tech geek, you may not know what this is. Basically, it’s an on-demand music streaming service– think Netflix for music.
I have no idea if Spotify’s American availability will translate to Canada. If Last.fm, Pandora, and Turntable.fm are any indication, then the answer is no-such luck (Last.fm IS available in Canada, but for a price– America is free– and there is no mobile streaming app).
So what to do if you’re still locked out? What I do. Use Rdio.
Shorthand, Rdio is exactly what I just said Spotify is– Netflix for music. And that means on-demand music listening, for a monthly fee. About $4 if you just want to use it on your computers, $10 if you want it on your cellphone (including the ability to store music there for offline listening). And I love it. It is the only paid app I’ve ever used (I’m frugal), and it’s worth every penny.
They have their own about to sell you on the pricing, so I’m just going to distill it into the things that make it worthwhile for me.
1. Tuesday is awesome.
Tuesday is the day that new albums come out. Back before the internet, it was the day you would go to the record store to see what had come in. Before Rdio, it was the day I scoured reviews to see what I should look into, maybe sampling some songs. After Rdio, it’s the day I go to Rdio’s blog, see what’s new, and hit a couple of buttons to sync albums I want to listen to to my phone. The whole process takes a couple of minutes– I do it with breakfast, and listen on my way to work. I love it.
2. They’re pretty good curators.
Smartly, Rdio the company acts less as a service and more as music-loving curators. Through their aforementioned blog plus Facebook and Twitter streams, they highlight artists and labels they have available, even putting together playlists that you can listen to to get an idea of what things are like. And they actually have pretty good taste.
3. Deep catalogue.
No service has everything, but Rdio is pretty good. There’s a couple of big names (the Beatles) and really small ones (Apollo Ghosts) that they don’t have that I wish they did, but it’s rare I’m not able to listen to a full song or album using Rdio. And they are constantly adding stuff, new and old, to their service. I am a voracious listener of many, many genres and I rarely come up short when using Rdio.
4. Nice interface.
It counts. It’s easy to navigate, intuitive to use, and the focus on album art in design is a good plus.
5. It’s made me listen to albums again.
Last year I mentioned that the internet had successfully altered my lsitening patterns away from albums and into singles. This is largely because I was using things like last.fm, the Hype Machine, CBC Radio 3, ex.fm and Soundcloud for most of my work day. And these are all geared towards single songs. Rdio is like those services in that it’s ubiquitous, portable, and easy to use, but the big difference is that it’s geared towards albums. And this year I find myself listening to more and more albums.
6. I like paying for music, but the old model is broken.
As a corollary to that last point, another part of the reason I wasn’t listening to albums is because I didn’t want to buy an album without hearing all the songs, but didn’t want to illegally download albums just to decide if I wanted to buy the album. Rdio solves that. I pay a monthly fee that is distributed by Rdio to those who pay to get the music made. In return, I get to rent albums. If I really like an album, I can buy it (including through Rdio). If I find myself going back to an artist again and again on Rdio, I purchase their product– knowing full well that I’m going to listen to it again and again.
There’s lots of other nice things about Rdio like playlists, scrobbling, etc but I’ll let you find them on your own. I just wanted to share some of the reasons I love it so hopefully people take a look at it alongside Spotify (which has much more media hype surrounding it) before making a decision.
PS. There’s a free trial of Rdio available, too– so you can check it out in full before deciding to buy. Highly recommended.
Earlier this week, I was doing a story on a “Tweet Up.” That’s when a bunch of Twitter users who may have never met each other in person get together for face-to-face conversations. They’ve been around for a while but are new to Prince George (this was the second one as far as anyone seems to know).
There were a wide variety of people there including some local politicians. I asked them about the challenges of maintaining a public online identity while already being a public figure. In other words, how do they successfully integrate the different hats they wear offline – politician, parent, business-owner, etc – into a cohesive online identity that doesn’t upset the voting public? One of them told me their approach was the same one they took to campaigning- be honest about who you are in all your iterations. After the interview, they asked me my own thoughts- where was online/offline identity convergence headed. My answer was this:
People will be more forgiving of public figures when they’re all public figures, too.
I didn’t really expand on that, but I’d like to try and do that now. To support my theory, I’m going to make some gross overgeneralizations. Here goes.
Prior to social media, the challenge of leading a public life (as a politician or celebrity) and a private one (as the person a politician or celebrity is when the cameras are off and they’re among family or close friends) was limited to relatively few. Your average person didn’t really have a concept of the public vs private self because they were, at all times, a private person. They switched between husband/father/son/employee/drinking buddy depending on who they were with, but in an offline world there was very little chance of those worlds colliding in a way that made maintaining a cohesive identity difficult. So perhaps people were a little less understanding when a public figure failed to maintain their public persona at all times, because the language and nuances of identity hadn’t entered the mainstream.
Today, if the statistics are correct, the majority of people in the developed world have public personas. They’re called “Facebook profiles.” Through them, everyone acts as their own PR person. They decide which TV shows they want to publicly declare they watch, which photos they share of themselves, and which thoughts they broadcast. Just as importantly, they decide which ones they leave out- what aspects of your private self don’t get mentioned in your public identity- and why? In every new social network you join you are asked “Who are you?” Eveytime you log into Facebook and Twitter you are asked “What are you doing?” And, implicitly, “What portion of the world would you like to share this information with?” Plus, there’s the everlooming paparazzi- friends with cameraphones at parties who may snap a photo of you looking stupid which, if your privacy settings are set up in a certain way, could be shared with your boss or your kids, or, even, the people who you will one day want to vote for you as you run for local government.
There were non-social media precursors to this, definitely, but the last five years have amped up the risks as well as the conversation surrounding identity and privacy. I was introduced to all of this as a university student and adult. I have cousins who basically don’t know what life was like without social networks and, whether they can articulate it or not, the challenges of maintaining a public persona as you grow and change as a person.
Can you imagine life if conversations you had as a pre-teen with friends were archived online? This is what they’re dealing with. And the odds of that many teenagers coming of age online without making a few digitally archived moves that they will retrospectively be less than proud of seem pretty low. That being the case, I think they’ll be less likely to judge someone with a picture of a beer funnel or who changes their political views as they move from high school to university to adulthood, because they’ll have done, if not the same, than something similar. To put things more crassly, when anyone can dig up SOME form of dirt on anyone else, the little bits of dirt probably won’t matter as much.
Like I said, I haven’t sat down and come up with some grand theory of this. There may be any number of flaws in my thoughts. And I definitely can’t say whether it will be good or bad if my prediction is correct. But here it goes, out into the digital archives with my name on it. Just like so many things with so many people’s names go out every day. We’ll see where this takes us.
I haven’t used Google+ yet. It’s a new social network created by Google. There are a wide variety of reasons Google wants to do this, which you can find using a quick Google search (ha!) but suffice it to say they are at least somewhat threatened by the success of Twitter, Tumblr, and especially Facebook and need their own “people engine.”
I’ve read lots of things about what Google needs to do if it wants to beat Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr. But quite honestly, I think they’ll be succssful if they do one thing and one thing only: beat email.
First, let me give you some of the reasons email needs fixing:
1. We Get Too Much of It.
I have three email accounts and all of them have a bunch of unread messages. I know I’m not alone. My co-workers, my partner, my parents all have the same complaint. They won’t even go into email sometimes because it feels too much like work. I sometimes have the same problem. There are lots of strategies for dealing with email overload, but the fact of the matter is that if you need to solve the problem, it’s already broken.
Now, it’s odd that email can feel broken because of how much of it we get while Facebook and Twitter feel less broken despite there being even MORE updates, but that brings me to my second point.
2. It’s Not Streamlined.
When I log on to Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr, (or even Google Reader) I’m given a nice, continuous stream of updates in reverse chronological order. All I have to do to keep reading is scroll down. If I want to reply, I hit “comment” in Facebook or “reply” in Twitter, a box appears, I type what I want to say and hit “enter”. The end. Oh, and there’s nice pictures indicating who said what.
When I log into my email account, I’m given a list of names and subject lines that may or may not have anything to do with what the email is about. I have to assess whether I want to read the content. If I do, I have to open a new window. To reply, I may or may not need to change the subject line. I may or may not need to bring new people into the conversation via the cc list, or I may or may not need to take them out. It’s tough to keep track of who’s involved in the conversation because it’s just email addresses that you may or may not know. Which brings me to point number three.
3. It’s Terrible for Conversation
My extended family, bless ’em, are eighty or more deep and like to keep in touch over email. This will often result in extended message threads with content amounting to “lol” and “Ha, I remember that.” There’s nothing wrong with that conversation, but for the reasons I outlined above, email is a terrible place to conduct it. I at least have Gmail which threads the conversation, but my parents get an individual email for each one. It’s tough to keep track of the chronology, who said what to who when, and if you come in late enough, even know what the whole thing is about (not to mention the quoted text full of everyone’s email address over and over and over again).
It’s the same problem with boards that I’m on or work-related emails. The conversation would work so much better in a threaded Disqus group or on Facebook (it wouldn’t work well on Twitter or Tumblr, and that’s why I don’t think either of them pose a major threat to Facebook). BUT in order for it work, all of these people would have to join Facebook and either be friends with each other OR join a Facebook group. Facebook groups are kind of terrible, and I don’t necessarily want to be ‘friends’ with every colleague I have– and beyond that, they often don’t want to have a Facebook account. So we’re still stuck in email for our digital conversation.
How Can Google Fix This?
When I first heard about Google+, I was mildly curious, but not really enthused. All the chatter was about how good it was vs Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr. And the fact of the matter is, my EXISTING online social graph is well-served by these services. I don’t need to take my Facebook contacts or my Twitter followers and bring them into a new service. They already work where they are.
But then I heard about ‘Circles’ which is where you take your Google+ contacts and put them into different groups. Doesn’t sound much different from what Facebook has tried in the past, except Facebook has never done it well and Google+ apparently does. So there’s that.
But THEN I found out that you can put people in circles even if they aren’t in Google+ and they’ll receive the information as an email. And that’s where I got interested. I’m not sure how it works, but if I’m able to receive information via a stream (my preferred method of consumption) and they’re able to receive information as a straight-up email (their preferred method of consumption) and it works well, then we’ve fixed email. Because they’re able to keep on getting information from me the way they always have, and I’m able to get information from them in way that doesn’t feel broken the way email does.
Put it another way: I don’t care if Google+ is able to bring me all of my Facebook and Twitter contacts, because I already have them on Facebook and Twitter, which are still working fine for me. But if they’re able to bring me my email contacts– a group of people who I need digital contact with but don’t yet have in any social network– in a better way, then I’m interested.
Like I said, I haven’t used Google+ yet. Maybe it falls short of what I’m hoping it will do. But if it does fall short, I’d like to put it out there: email needs fixing, and anyone who’s able to do that still has a chance to join the social networking race.
Further Reading: Save Our Inboxes! Adopt the Email Charter
In yesterday’s edition of the Prince George Free Press the opinions page had a section called “Tweets in P.G.” (I’d link but there doesn’t appear to be a digital version). They reprinted some of their favourite Tweets on a variety of subjects affecting Prince George. It’s a fun idea, and one I’d actually like to see more of.
But I find it interesting that the paper chose not to attribute any of the Tweets. As in, they have a bullet-point list of a dozen or so Tweets, but not a single username. So we have no idea who said what.
I find this a bit odd. When people are quoted in articles, write letters to the editor or appear in the “man on the street” segments, the quotes are attributed. So why not Tweets, where all you have to do is copy-and-paste the username? These people said these things in a public forum (albeit a virtual one), and it would seem to me under normal newspaper guidelines it would be reasonable to attribute these quotes.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think the Free Press did this in any malicious or mean-spirited way. It’s not as if they’re stealing intellectual property and users are being denied payment. And the fact they’re taking Tweets to print is indication they’re embracing the role the internet can play in enhancing traditional media. They’ve been getting active online, frequently re-tweeting other media outlets and individual users alike. But when they do that, we see who they’re quoting. Hopefully in future editions they’ll do the same thing in print.
See also: “If It’s On the Internet, Does That Make It Quotable?” by Caroline McCarthy
I am not a writer. Which is odd, since I spend a good portion of my time being paid for my writing.
But the type of writing I do for radio is “get in, get out, and let the guest tell the story.” There is a skill to it, and there are people who do it that I would call writers, but I am not among them. I research, and I report. I try do it in a way that people can understand and makes them pay attention, but I don’t think I’m a writer.
On my blog, I write my thoughts. I try to do it in a way that can hold your attention and is easy to understand. But I still wouldn’t call myself a writer.
Over the past couple of days, we had a band staying in our house. Last night, we went out and watched them perform. And listening to the lyrics, I was reminded of what a writer is.
A writer can capture moments and feelings in just a few words. There were lines in songs that conjured up mental images of places I’ve not been and experiences I’ve not had and triggered images of places I have seen and experiences I have had. The best writers open up emotions and possibly even explore new ones.
When I write for radio, I’m trying to set things up so the guests will feel like sharing THEIR emotions and conjure up THEIR memories. But I’m setting it up, not doing it for them. And when I’m writing for news, I’m writing facts. Again, there are people in radio who can do this while still evoking strong images, but I don’t think I’m there– yet.
Over the past year or so my focus has been on “unlearning” academic writing. Being a student and later a researcher taught me a lot of things about being objective and laying out an argument but it did not teach my brevity. It did not teach me how to write in a way that sounded like a conversation.
I feel like I’m getting there. Twitter helps me be brief. This blog helps me lay out thoughts and arguments in a way that is reasonably easy to understand. And I think that’s helping me in my scripts.
But I still don’t feel like I’ve hit that magic of being able to make an entire audience remember a personal memory or emotion through a simple lyric. Maybe one day, but not yet. It was nice seeing someone who is doing that, because it reminds me of how far I have to go still. It’s why I listen to shows like “This American Life” or read blogs or listen to music by people who are better at what they do than I am. I find my best work comes from when I’m shooting for something.
I have no idea how I came across it, but a couple of days ago I read Cities and Ambition by Paul Graham (Kindles are made for essays, by the way). In it, Graham argues that cities (or at least great cities) send a message. He writes:
New York tells you, above all: you should make more money. There are other messages too, of course. You should be hipper. You should be better looking. But the clearest message is that you should be richer.
What I like about Boston (or rather Cambridge) is that the message there is: you should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you’ve been meaning to.
When you ask what message a city sends, you sometimes get surprising answers. As much as they respect brains in Silicon Valley, the message the Valley sends is: you should be more powerful.
He goes on. Fifteenth century Florence nurtured painters. LA likes fame, Washington insiders, Paris culture.
I haven’t lived in many cities, but whenever I visit a place I’m fascinated at trying to discover its character. I think listening for the message might be the best way to do that.
Victoria asked for some combination of insider-ism and aristocracy, and I’m not sure which was dominant. I’ve not lived in Vancouver, but the message I get from it is definitely money. Wuhan, China may have been too foreign for me to pick up on, but it certainly felt like it was “you should have more stuff.” People were discovering consumerism in a big way, and it was a city made up of new city dwellers.
And Prince George? “Big. Your stuff should be bigger.”
Everything here is about size. We’re constantly expanding construction. And when we do, we’re building ever-bigger McMansions. Bigger yards are better. When we were looking for houses, most realtors would show off the size of the yard, saying “lots of space for your toys”– meaning, of course, ATVs, motorboats, and other big vehicles.
Big box stores, big trucks, big nature to get out into, big snowblowers to clean out big driveways. There’s a growing cohort of people looking for something different, particularly in the downtown, but you’re kidding yourself if you think big isn’t the dominant message. Money comes primarily from resource-based industries, and goes primarily to big things.
I don’t know how I feel about that message. I don’t think I’ve bought into it, but I do have a bigger house than I grew up in, even if I don’t have a big vehicle in the driveway. I have a big yard, even if it is for gardens rather than power vehicles.
I’m curious if other people get the same message as me? Leave your thoughts in the comments below, or fire me message @akurjata.
Just over a year ago, I posted this picture:
That’s the transition point off of a highway, one of the highest-traffic sections in Prince George. The bike lane is– well, a yellow sign encouraging motorists to share the road. There is nothing else, not even a white line.
Earlier this year, I posted this picture:
That’s the side of the road full of gravel after street sweeping.
In both these cases, I was arguing that changes need to be made if we want to get people out biking. For anyone who’s not a confident city biker, this sort of thing is not exactly going to get out there.
Yesterday in the Prince George Citizen, Frank Peebles brought this dismal bike lane situation to the front page. But it’s not bikers he’s primarily concerned with. It’s people with disabilities on motroized chairs. From the article:
“Motorchairs and bicycles are popping in and out of traffic because cars are parking in the city’s bike lanes.
Although Ruth Blank is concerned for her health as she drives her motorized wheelchair around those parked cars, the law is clear. The cars are allowed to be there.
“Why are they building bike lanes if you can’t even use them?,” she said. “Why don’t they put a law in that says no parking in bike lanes?”
RCMP spokesman Cpl. Craig Douglass said the present conditions allow drivers to park in any of those wider side-lanes for bikes unless there is a sign designating them as No Parking zones.
“Those scooters are to be used on sidewalks, where one exists. We ask that they be on the sidewalk whenever possible,” Douglass said. “Those machines are considered a wheelchair which puts it into the same category as being a pedestrian. That is why the city invests in ramps for the curbs.”
Not bicycles, however. Bikes cannot be ridden on sidewalks (small children are allowed), their speed puts them into a different class. They must use the bike lanes and if necessary, enter the regular flow of traffic when safe to do so. Once in the flow of traffic, vehicles must consider them a motorized vehicle and only pass them in a safe, legal manner.”
Parked cars, pulled over buses, garbage cans, construction– there are any number of things stuck in bike lanes without any alternative. Can you imagine the outcry if passing lanes were only passing lanes so long as no one decided to park in them?
I’ve posted this quote about bike culture in Copenhagen in the past, too, but it’s worth revisiting:
“…we rode almost exclusively in dedicated bike lanes, which as Canadians we’d come to believe consisted of a stripe of paint on the edge of a busy roadway, or even just a pictograph of a bicycle floating helplessly among parked and idling cars (serving mainly as practice targets for passing motorists). Copenhagen’s bike lanes, by a comparison so stark it makes little sense to use the same term, are flawlessly designed and maintained, with physical barriers such as curbs, medians, and parked cars between them and the motorized traffic, and their own traffic lights at major intersection.”
If we really want to encourage people biking to work (and we should– it’s good for the environment, it’s good for public health, and it eases the burdens on roads which would mean less maintenance costs) we need to at the very least RECOGNIZE that the infrastructure we have is lacking. I’m not expecting a wholesale embrace of a Copenhagen-type system, but maybe something a little more adequate than “share the road” signs, or recognition that bikers may be safer on sidewalks than they are in loose gravel alongside high speed traffic.
I have been blogging off and on since 2007. It started as many blogs do– an unfocused, sporadic journal about my own life and subjects– mostly music– that caught my fancy. I blogged regularly while living in China, mostly as a means to vent (it can be a tough country to adjust to). Upon returning to Canada, I drifted in and out. I created a “personal” blog that was much like my original, and a music blog that was supposed to be think pieces on Canadian culture. Both of those chugged along for a while before ultimately disappearing.
The problem in all these cases, I think, was that I was blogging for someone else. To a certain extent, I wanted to write stuff that other people would want to read. And so I tried to do it regularly and in an entertaining manner, attempting to mimic existing successful blogs. And inevitably I just wound up linking to other people’s stuff in an attempt to remain current. I wrote some posts that I’m proud of but others are just throw-away photos or references to other people’s work.
Over the last few months, I finally feel like I’ve found my voice for blogging. In part, it’s because I’ve got other outlets to share my less-substantial thoughts on. Twitter is where I put out links to things that interest me, and Tumblr has evolved into a great place for me to post daily music tracks, some personal photos, and links to other people’s writing that I enjoy. They lets me scratch an itch while leaving my blog for more substantial work.
I’ve decided (or, more accurately, come to realize) that my blog is a place to put long-form, original thoughts. I’m inspired by others, but I only post something if I feel like I have something larger to contribute to the conversation. That helps give it a voice.
The other thing that helps give it a voice is that I no longer write with the purpose of getting an audience. Basically, it’s like this: if something is on my mind and I feel like I’d like to explore it further, I turn it into a blog post. If there’s nothing there, I don’t write about it. I’m not a news outlet. I’m not a music site. I’m a person with questions and viewpoints and thoughts and blogging gives me an outlet to express those. I write for the purpose of working out my own thoughts. And for that and that alone I would recommend blogging, even if it’s just you saving Word documents on your personal computer.
But what’s so gratifying about this is that even though I’m not writing with the purpose of attracting a large audience, an audience is out there. It’s small, but bigger than I would expect and apparently growing. I see it in the traffic to my site. I see it in retweets and “likes” and comments. When I write things like my pieces on the Vancouver riots or yesterday’s post on issues of prejudices facing Aboriginal Canadians or even how I came to like hockey, I am not chronicling my personal life, but I am chronicling things that are personal to me– in some ways MORE personal than what I had for breakfast or where I went last Friday night. And so seeing that other people care enough to read these things, and even better SHARE them with others, is fulfilling in a way I never expected. People I’ve never met are interacting with my thoughts, disseminating them, and building on or even arguing against them. I’ve received emails and feedback on a variety of subjects, and I’m always happy to hear from other people. It’s unexpected, surprising, and something that could only happen in this day and age. So to all of you who have read or are reading– thank you. I truly appreciate the feedback.
Ad nauseam
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July 27 2011 | ∞
When I posted that on Facebook last week, I had no idea it would open up so much discussion. But it did, capping out at 67 comments (many mine) from people for and against the use of hotmail.com. A smaller, albeit still large (for me) came on Twitter. It seems to be an issue that resonates with people.
Before I go further, I want to temper this by saying that for personal email, I could care less what provider someone uses. You’re entrenched, you have your old emails there, it works for you, go for it. I also don’t want to talk about the relative merits of one email service over another. We all have opinions. And I certainly would never judge someone based solely on their email provider– I’m still going to put the content of the email above where it came from (though others may not be so kind).
I am, however, very interested in whether or not you can seem professional while using a hotmail.com email address. The answer (at least in fields of communications, design and technology) increasingly seems to be “no.”
When I posted my comment, I was thinking of this and this. One humorous and one serious look at the generalizations that go along with different email addresses. In either case, hotmail doesn’t look good.
I’m not saying this is fair. I’m not saying it even makes sense (though some people will certainly try to rationalize it). But is it any more arbitrary than any of the other conventions we have?
You don’t show up for a job interview in ripped jeans and a grubby t-shirt, even though they cover you the same as a suit and tie. You don’t scribble phone numbers on cereal boxes even though it accomplishes the same thing as a business card. And you put resumes on white paper, not pink, even though it doesn’t affect the information contained within.
As a society, we’ve decided superficial information matters. It speaks to the (supposed) competence and professionalism of the individuals behind the content, regardless of the content itself. Whether you agree or disagree with the sentiment, it’s worth knowing what subconscious messaging you’re putting out there every time you send an email.
Filed under: Best Of, technology | Discussion