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Daily Diigo Public Link 02/27/2008

February 26, 2008 at 5:41 pm | In links | 1 Comment

Here’s one reason students Barack the vote: respect – Crosscut Annotated

tags: blogging, citizen_journalism, clinton, obama, politics, presidency, respect, seattle

Wow, and wow again! U-Dub communications prof David Domke describes how his citizen-journalist blogger students were treated by the politicians campaigning for president, and the differences between Hillary & Barack are astounding.

One of Domke’s students, Jennifer Ware, describes it like this: “John McCain spoke in Seattle (the same day) to about 500 people at the Westin Hotel’s conference room. Clinton spoke to a gathering of 5,000 at a waterfront pier (on February 7). Obama spoke at Key Arena, home to the Seattle Supersonics; it seats 18,000 and it wasn’t nearly big enough. People were sitting on the stairs, in the aisles. Seasoned reporters were smiling and nodding softly as he spoke. Some people had tears in their eyes when he came on stage. There’s all kinds of spin out there, but you simply can’t spin those numbers. Or the stark contrast to the others in the race.”

Domke adds, further down: “It seems that the take-home point here is this: The Clinton campaign has made the case that Obama is nothing but rhetoric; he’s supposedly all words, while she’s all action. Our experiences showed us that their campaigns — at least in Seattle — were exactly the opposite. In their treatment of my students, Clinton’s campaign was all talk, while Obama’s was all walk.”

Obama for President!

FREE LOVE Annotated

tags: free, marketing, trends, trendwatch

Available as a 15-page printable PDF, too, this is the website version. From the intro:
“FREE LOVE: the ongoing rise of free, valuable stuff that’s available to consumers online and offline. From AirAsia tickets to Wikipedia, and from diapers to music.
FREE LOVE thrives on an all-out war for consumers’ ever-scarcer attention and the resulting new business models and marketing techniques, but also benefits from the ever-decreasing costs of producing physical goods, the post-scarcity dynamics of the online world (and the related avalanche of free content created by attention-hungry members of GENERATION C), the many C2C marketplaces enabling consumers to swap instead of spend, and an emerging recycling culture.
Expect FREE LOVE to become an integral if not essential part of doing business.”

Logic+Emotion: Thinking Through The “3 U’s”… Annotated

tags: apps, economy, marketing, socialnetworks, web2.0

The 3 Us — damn that apostrophe, it’s all wrong as used in the article’s title. But if you leave it out, it reads as “the 3 us,” as in *us* or *them*… Regardless, an interesting summing up of what might make applications interesting for users. See notes.

The Shipyard Returns – O’Reilly Radar Annotated

tags: adaptability, container_housing, creative_spaces, o’reilly, shipyard

In Vancouver, Wendy Waters just posted something about using shipping containers for housing (not unknown here in Victoria, with Zigloo right here in the Fernwood neighbourhood), and presto-bingo, here’s a post about using containers to create (one presumes and one hopes affordable) artists’ workspaces! Yes, that would be welcome: someplace for the low-cash-flow creatives to live & work…

The Many Facets Of Tomoko Sawada – PingMag

tags: art, avant_garde, japan, performance_art, ping_mag, tomoko_sawada

This is beautiful, and incredible. Tomoko Sawada works, I guess, at the interstices of art and acting, a whole new calibre of performance art perhaps? It’s incredible stuff, at any rate. “Who is she?” asks the article. Obviously so talented that it’s easy enough to want to look, but tricky enough to make you think.

Is “balance” enough?

February 26, 2008 at 11:48 am | In crime, ideas, scenes_victoria, social_critique | 2 Comments

Just a quick post, as I’m still in catch-up mode. This morning I read an article in the local paper about a man who has 250 charges against him for public drunkenness, causing disturbances, aggressive panhandling, harassing people, and so on. “Red,” as he’s called in the article, is not homeless, according to police, and they do not believe that he has a mental health problem (although that’s debatable, given his behavior). See Persistent panhandler gets summons under a section of community charter.

Now the city will use a new community charter bylaw to haul this individual before court, where they hope the judge will sentence him to stay away from the downtown core. The intent is to ban Red from panhandling and from “socializing” downtown.

One city council member, quoted in the article, says, “There’s always got to be a balanced approach in dealing with all the issues.”

This bothers me, maybe because we hear too much about “balance” these days. The councilor is concerned that Red’s rights to be downtown on the street to panhandle (which isn’t illegal as such) aren’t infringed upon, and that the way to address the problems caused by the behaviors of people like Red is to seek balance. It somehow makes me think that balance is starting to become a sort of mantra which doesn’t allow valuation. And if that’s the case, you have to ask: Is “balance” stasis? If so, it’s death.

What about judgement? Are we (especially in Canada) so afraid of judging (as my daughter pointed out to me a couple of years ago, in Canada judges need to take workshops to learn how to be non-judgemental…) that we opt for balance (stasis), versus embracing quick, nimble, intellectually aware and alert change? And besides, isn’t our supposed balance often enough just an appearance of balance? All sorts of stuff is still out of whack beneath the surface and in other domains, and the fervent wish for balance is …well, just a wish. Perhaps a wish to get out of making judgements and decisions?

It’s ironic that the US should be full of religious evangelists, whose mantra on the Christian side of the register is not to judge, lest ye be judged, and yet it’s we in Canada, supposedly secular, who are holier than thou in being non-judgemental.

So here’s the deal: I have a problem with being non-judgemental, especially since I’m not a Christian or religious. Being non-judgemental might work fine in your spiritual life, but it sucks when it comes to ethics and politics and economics and policy. You know, it’s like that old shibboleth about rendering unto Caesar what’s Caesar’s and onto god what’s god’s.

Which finally makes me wonder if politicians, when they talk about “seeking balance,” are refusing to judge, …which makes me wonder whether focusing on “balance” is replacing decision-making. I also wonder whether balance in the spiritual sense was ever intended to be a sort of placeholder for anything, whether painful or pleasurable.

As an atheist, I object to any strategy or philosophy that introduces religion into politics. When people talk about “balance,” they usually mean something quasi-religious (or at least “spiritual,” whatever that horse of a different color means to all the riders out there).  Whether the councilor in question is religious or not is moot for me at this point.  I’m concerned with the discourse of “balance,” which is starting to sound like religion.  I object to religion whenever and wherever it worms its way into places where it doesn’t belong.