Yule Heibel’s Post Studio © 2003-2008

Diigo Bookmarks 05/04/2008 (a.m.)

• Escapable Logic » Blog Archive » “Oh, if only government went in for an open source make-over…” - Annotated

  Britt Blaser coins the compelling term “collaboration mall.” I left a long comment on April 28, but it appears stuck in moderation or has been deleted. Here’s what I wrote:

  QUOTE
  Thank-you for using my comment as a jumping off point to a thought-provoking blog entry here, Britt! (And I hope I didn’t sound as ‘despairing’ as all that — my despair, such as it is, stems as often as not from the fossilized pace of local governance here. Other than that, I’m a pretty optimistic, happy-go-lucky person, which is probably why I’m ready to stumble into pre-existing conversations! …Like, duh Yule: one quick google search could have told me that you, Britt, have been talking about open source government for …well, for a while.)

  But on to your post: I really like your descriptive term, “collaboration mall.” As a city person (and yeah, Victoria is a smaller city, but it’s pretty dense and urban and walkable), I’m of course loathe to admit that the suburbs might be places that produce appropriate symbols (”mall”) for civitas / civic life. But I can remind myself that in the 1920s Walter Benjamin wrote about 19th century Parisian arcades as localities of social meaning (and manufacture of meaning) — and what were the arcades but urban forerunners of suburban malls?

  I’d say that the urban street is still more democratic/ porous/ open, if only because it really is public space, vs. private or semi-private. But the mall can bring together all sorts of different (including “regular”) people, and it’s a great term (compared to “street”) because it acknowledges the reality of markets, fees for services, settings for enterprise, and consumer platforms.

  I’m at the very beginning of trying to create a community aggregator type service here, and your suggestion of a “collaboration mall” is intriguing. Just as with Doc’s entry on infrastructure, I find it helps my thinking when one (physical) thing typically seen in one context is transposed into another (more abstract) context. Till now, I was thinking for example of “public space” (physical) and how that manifests online (abstract). But narrowing that space to a mall brings things into better focus.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: infrastructure, britt_blaser, collaboration_mall

Persecuting smokers …and leaving everyone else to their own devices

There’s an editorial in today’s Times-Colonist, Persecuting smokers, which includes a reference to BC Provincial Health Officer Dr. Perry Kendall that has me scratching my head.

The editorial is about the Lower Mainland municipality of White Rock’s plan to ban smoking in all outdoor public places by 2010.  This would include streets, parks, beaches: everywhere.  The editorial notes that this “looks more like a plan to persecute smokers than a strategy for protecting non-smokers.”  Agree.  Dr. Kendall, meanwhile, is fully supportive of this plan.

Why am I scratching my head?  I’m just not clear on why Dr. Kendall thinks that banning smoking in all public spaces (including streets, beaches, anywhere) would “‘de-normalize smoking’ so that fewer youths are tempted to take up the habit,” while at the same time Dr. Kendall also advocates in favor of freely dispensing needles to addicts (who promptly take their needle and shoot up openly on the street or in a park, incidentally also in full view of “youths”) and handing out “crack kits” (pipes, mouth condoms) to addicts, who (again) then openly ingest these substances on the street.  There seems to be no concern over the social disorder on the street that results from the sort of half-way “harm reduction” that simply involves giving addicts the tools, leaving them to continue as before.

I don’t smoke, although I used to smoke.  I loathe the smell of smoke and ashtrays.  But I think there’s something really sick about our increasingly blinkered society that we’ll go after smokers, while we hand the streets over to users (and pushers — oh, yes, so many pushers in Victoria) of hard drugs.  It’s as though the nanny state is in overload mode.  It can’t “solve” the drug issue, so it downloads it to the street (that’s us).  It can’t “solve” the problems of addiction and mental health (and resultant homelessness — and crime, typically property crime to support drug habits), so it downloads them to the street (that’s us).  But it can appear “forward-thinking” and “health-minded” when it comes to “us” (citizens, who unlike the chronically homeless, can still be fined — the latter are beyond fining), so downloads another nanny-esque ban on us.   We’re just supposed to hold still and take it, just as we’re supposed to hold still for all the other downloading.

The editorial disagrees with a ban on all outdoor/ public space smoking, and succeeds in making a critique of Kendall’s stance on smoking by pointing out that we ban the consumption of alcohol on the street, but “youths” still drink.  But it doesn’t make the connection that we have given up on controlling the use of hard drugs on our streets.  It suggests instead that: “Smokers are a dying breed. We shouldn’t be so hasty to take away what few places they have left to indulge their habits.”

Oh really?  First, show me that smokers are a dying breed, unless that’s meant literally of course.  And second, is this “time will take care of it” attitude what’s letting our streets go to hell with regard to hard drugs?

Diigo Bookmarks 05/03/2008 (p.m.)

• How do we fund journalism in future? | Greenslade | Guardian Unlimited - Annotated

  Roy Greenslade reporting from a “future of journalism” conference in Australia, asking after ‘the business model’ for newspapers / journalism of the future. He mentions Jay Rosen, who joined the conference via satellite hook-up, and this in turn sparks some interesting conversation on the comments board (particularly by Rosen himself).

  tags: greenslade, the_guardian, journalism, business_model, newspapers, jay_rosen