My new friend at The Meat Hook pointed out this nice map of the changing definitions of a gentrified neighborhood’s boundaries, from the Very Small Array. This plays well with any number of examples: from Venice to the East Village.
I’ve been interested in the iPhone as a research device for a while (Data Logger is a free iPhone app that allows you to geotag and track all sorts of input), but there’s a few movements on using the iPhone as an educational device. Is it a tool, or another example of the digital divide? More thoughts to come.
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It is technology that has made them different, and as we see what this technology can do we need to recognize you can’t kill the instinct the technology produces; we can only criminalize it. We can’t stop our kids from using it; we can only drive it underground. We can’t make our kids passive again; we can only make them, quote, “pirates.” And is that good? We live in this weird time, it’s kind of age of prohibitions, where in many areas of our life, we live life constantly against the law. Ordinary people live life against the law, and that’s what I — we — are doing to our kids. They live life knowing they live it against the law. That realization is extraordinarily corrosive, extraordinarily corrupting. And in a democracy we ought to be able to do better. Do better, at least for them, if not for opening for business. –Lawrence Lessig
My research for a paper on ethnographic characters has taken me back over a century of sociological thinking and there has been no better resource than The Mead Project. I realize that this is something that I should share with anyone who visits this site. I have been digging into Thomas and Park, and there’s been a lot of great, seemingly forgotten texts here. Enjoy.
From farm to fork, the use of urban spaces is greening up, from Baltimore to Detroit. Carolyn Steel on ‘How to Feed a City.’ (And Robert Neuwirth on ‘Squatter Cities.’) More to come.
An Op-Ed piece by Charles Blow notes that analysts give the music industry 10 years:
A study last year conducted by members of PRS for Music, a nonprofit royalty collection agency, found that of the 13 million songs for sale online last year, 10 million never got a single buyer and 80 percent of all revenue came from about 52,000 songs. That’s less than one percent of the songs.
The NYTimes has a nice graphic on the fadeout.
The New Yorker has an article about ticket sales, TicketMaster and LiveNation, ‘The Price of the Ticket.’ Within, John Seabrook interviews Princeton Economist states that, there’s “still an element of rock concerts that is more like a party than a commodities market,” and that it bears resemblance to the gift exchange.
Related, here‘s a piece on how the publishing industry, as it exists today, is doomed.
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David Lynch’s Interview Project begins.
A fun piece in the NYTimes on the possibility of an emoticon in a 1862 article on a President Lincoln address. Jennifer 8. Lee does a great job sniffing out the possibility, as well as pointing us to the Wikipedia page, which includes examples of them from the late 1800s. The examples below were published in the March 30 1881 issue of Puck. I found the differences between eastern and western emoticon styles to be of particular interest. Western styles ‘read’ horizontal, while eastern ones are vertical. Western smile: : ) Eastern smile: (^_^) Western surprise: :0 Eastern surprise: (0.o)
Of course, the ‘fun/fluff’ aspect of it gives way to the deeper ways that the media shapes the messege. One of the things I found to be particularly pursuasive about the ‘pro-proto-emotion’ arguements was that the reprinting of Lincoln’s speech required typesetting, and the setter had to make the mistake of placing a space before the semicolon as well as the semicolon itself. Two mistakes. 
These things go well with thinking about texting (Times has an older article called ‘Text Generation Gap: U R 2 Old (JK)’) and reading (‘Online, R U Really Reading?’)
In preparing to talk about representations of reality, and thinking about the Dogma 95 movement in film, I came across this amazing flash animation of images and stories of life living in Jakarta, Kibera, Caracas, and Dharavi, called ‘The Places We Live.’ It’s unbelievably riveting, and I cannot wait to teach Urban again, although it’s going to be great for Media, Technology, and Sociology. (Also, check out this amazing stop-action film of a plane flying over glowing cities at night.)