Walk softly and carry a big stick

We’re just over a week into the federal election campaign here in Canada and that means candidates are doing a lot of traveling across the country hoping for great photo ops. Check out this chart comparing the carbon footprints to date of five party leaders on the campaign trail.

This is how a revolution is tweeted

This is a very cool data visualization of how many people were communicating about Egypt on February 11, the day autocratic President Hosni Mubarak resigned from office. It tracks the usage of the hashtag #jan25. Nodes are Twitter users and links between nodes indicate retweets..

All of these tweets represent a sample of only 10 percent of the actual activity and were collected in a single hour. Read the creator's piece on how it was done here.

There has been an ongoing debate about the viability of social media to effect real societal change. The discussion was amplified in the public sphere following the publication of Malcolm Gladwell's now-famous New Yorker article, which I previously posted about.

Principle Interest

A StatsCan study released yesterday found that the number of people making principled purchasing decisions is on the rise. In 2008, the proportion of people who had purchased or boycotted a product for ethical reasons rose to 27%, compared to 20% in 2003.

"Levels of education and income had an effect on the probability of having chosen or boycotted a product for ethical reasons. For example, in 2008, 41% of people with a university degree had purchased or boycotted a product for ethical reasons, compared with 22% of those whose highest level of education was a high school diploma. Also, people with the highest income were much more likely to have consumed or boycotted a product for ethical reasons than those with a lower income.

"The other factors associated with greater participation in ethical consumption were being born in Canada; living common-law or being single; living in a metropolitan area; having little confidence in major corporations; not having any religious affiliation; having a greater sense of personal control; and actively participating in several organized groups.

The Long Take

It took only took five seconds into this new decade before a new world record was set: On January 1, at 12:00:04 a.m., 6,939 tweets were sent within the space of one second in Japan.

No doubt a huge number of those messages were seasonal greetings to ring in the new year, but I'm old enough to remember a time when at the stroke of midnight on NYE, people would open their front doors and shout their good wishes to their neighbours from their porches. Who knew, in 1980, that in thirty years we would be able to reach people around the world with the same messages without leaving our sofas.

It is this great benefit of accessibility that gets obscured by those who criticize social media tools, like Twitter, for disseminating misinformation and degenerating the level of public discourse. (Of course, these phenomena are not the fault of the technology.)

In a short article published recently in Wired, Clive Thompson proposes that in fact what we're seeing is not a degeneration of discourse, but a new way of organizing it. He argues that tools such as Twitter and Facebook are being used to share headlines, make brief statements of fact or spread short bits of gossip and the like, but that blogs are being used to publish in-depth analyses and reports. He calls this publishing style the long take (a nod to the long tail concept popularized by Chris Anderson.) The long take blog post has several benefits over traditional print media: it can reach a wider audience, its shelf-life is way longer than what magazines and newspapers could ever offer, and you don't have to be employed by a media outlet to make your voice heard. Anyone can publish. Oh, and it's generally free.

I'm not sure I totally agree that the 'middle take' is going the way of the dodo, but my experience of social media is in complete accord with his schema: headlines that are tweeted and texted point me in the direction of where I'd like to pursue further in-depth reading.

The point is that social media technologies are for sharing information. It's unlikely, for example, that a wikipedia entry would ever be used to substantiate a claim in a fact-based argumentative paper, but that's not what wikipedia is for. Its content is user-generated, so it's merely a starting point. It can give you an idea of what's already being talked about on a given topic. Verifying the information is up to the reader. Hasn't that always been the case?

The other 2010

If by some disquieted remembrance I carry with me the tokens of this year into the next, I will not be burdened by the actions I haven’t taken.

I began this year resolute in my quest for aesthetic newness: scrap the old standards and proceed as a tabula rasa, anything goes. Mix it up a little, and see what magic happens. It has been a fun ride, but I can’t resist spending a little time revisiting some of the records that occupied space in my cultural inventory this past year. I'm sure on some level its an evaluative exercise, a necessary step in synthesizing the old conflicts and revising my discourse. Whatever the reason, I find myself embracing this seasonal closure with a return to one of my favourite recordings this year.

This evening’s party has the Hidden Names in heavy rotation. It's an apt choice for a gathering that will inevitably become a toast to alterity. (Are we really celebrating newness in the dead of winter?). Because this holiday, more than any other, is a culturally sanctioned conversation about possibility. It is a time to talk about things other than the here and now. It is a time to talk about novelty, and change, and dissolution and resolution that aren’t really apparent but that will certainly come. The Hidden Names -- so wholly an accolade to otherness that the question of 'where else could I be?' is less relevant than the responsive: Everywhere. And the implications are rendered all the more fantastic in the album's title: there are things outside the here and now, hidden things, and revealing them requires a change of perspective. It’s a subtle suggestion that if you're searching for answers, looking around is only half as good as looking beyond.

The album's opening tune is a kind of if-you-cross-this-threshold overture to a suite of songs about the contingency of existence and finding your place among life’s random turns and enigmatic offerings. “As the World Turned Out,” is itself a trope (etymologists: geddit?) on the paradoxes and ambiguities of our human efforts: with every gesture we make, we are at once in the process (as the world turns) of devising our own narratives, and at the same time perfecting those actions to completion, fait accompli (how every moment turns out); on to the next.

In the room where the guests are arriving, the step-into-my-parlour imperative commands a familiar response. Conversations revolve around the album’s thematic gravity, ambiguity. It is a condition very well established in the band’s repertoire, and more than a couple of guests are playfully taking stock of its post-postmodern vitality. They speak a dialect I know well. Take ambiguity and perhapses and contingency and doubt and turn them into wonder. Look back on the year that has just passed. This is how it turns out.

Alterity is the shibboleth of our tribe, and tonight we are all of us dreamers of our unrealized selves in impossible contexts. We talk of what could have been yesterday and what may be tomorrow. Talk of what should be here and now. If I resolve to state my case with conviction, I would fail to solecism. We are delinquents of otherness, the music reminds us. We are sentenced to this time and place. Here, the quest for individuality, for solitude, is always already thwarted by the noise of human activity, the cacophony of the streets outside the window, the clamour and the clutter of modern life.

"Convinced we are completed / We surround ourselves with junkpiles / We’re so far from naked / We’ve got walls all around us."

In the end if you're looking for your place in the world, what matters is not so much preserving your individuality, but overwriting it, redescribing it. Our stories are written through perpetual chains of self-deconstruction and rebuilding. Meshing our fragmented egos with something other means finding truths about ourselves in new contexts.

“If I fall to little pieces / you can fall to little pieces / we can mingle our debris.”

After all, none of us has complete agency over our existence, each of us living, rather, in “borrowed time and rented space.” Contending with the possibility that you’ve been initiated into the wrong tribe is as exciting as it is heartbreaking, but it is at the very least a way of ensuring continuity. It means your lexicon can never be final. Keep asking questions, keep opening doors, to keep moving.

Our festivities will continue into the night. There will be revelry, conversation, warm embraces and shared stories. The music will play on until the last clink of glasses has escaped into the night air and our voices have waned to a whisper. And then our last song. Motion, and gesture toward the new. Move, because dancing is ecstatic. Keep moving because dancing is ex-static. In this new year. Everything will be new. In this new year everything will be new. I will be new. This is our satori.

“Keep this fire in your heart / Keep this fire to their feet / In the day that we find us”

It's not going to make any sense, the song tells us. The answer is the question. But what matters is persistence, because everything is transitory. Our ideas get displaced; our egos become fragmented. So we rebuild, and we remember, and we go on.

If truth exists, then it is fleeting. Like beauty and pain and happiness and love, and everything else worth living for, truth is always contextualized. Its very impermanence is elusive. I am humbled by an infinity of possibilities that were never realized. So many would-be realities that arise and are lost in an instant… every instant. My thoughts now concern not only the astonishing luck that my life choices were ever made, but that they were exactly right.

You see, this is how the world turned out. So far so good.

Happy new year to you.

***
The lyrics cited in this post are transcribed, to the best of my auditory interpretation, from the following songs. The band’s name is, of course, hidden.

As the World Turned Out
Cluttered
Little Pieces
Soft Lies
Mad Mad Day

Quantifying the walkability of communities

I've got a birthday vacation to take in the coming months, and being someone who prefers walkable cosmopolitan areas, I found this cool site to be an invaluable resource for my planning. You can check out how your neighbourhood ranks in its walkability, and you can choose, as I did, your next holiday city from the list of walker's paradises in the U.S. Not surprisingly, New York neighbourhoods dominate the top ten.

My own neighbourhood gets a respectable score of 77 on the index. I have no argument with that, but one factor that the ranking system doesn't account for is climate. My city, for example, tends to get a lot of snow in the winter. And, as a very experienced pedestrian, I would say that although snow on its own is usually quite manageable, slippery sidewalks resulting from compressed snow and ice can make an area completely unwalkable. Where I live, sidewalk snow and ice removal is sporadic and rarely timely. Roads and vehicles are very much the priority and proponents of car culture are still the dominant voices in my community.

Of course, I'm hoping that will change. With statistics beginning to emerge about all of the peripheral problems related to driving, it would be nice to see more people getting out of their vehicles and onto the bike paths or walkways. Until then, my travel destinations will be cities that allow me to experience them with all of my senses, in the open air, unhindered, moving through their spaces wholly on my own volition.

Clearly this is a community that wants to collaborate

There were some great speakers today at the Collaborative Management conference hosted and attended by Government of Canada employees. Great turnout and some good panel discussions made for an interesting day. In case the sentiment hasn't yet completely saturated the cultural sphere, the keywords for the future are openness and collaboration. GCpedia (which is only available to federal employees) is a great forum for having these conversations, and its more than 19000 active users are showing auspicious signs of getting the party started. But there's something about getting together in person which spices up those cyber-discussions that have been in the works for weeks or even months online. The Canadian government's CIO gave a presentation in which she confirmed that Canada has an open data project in the works, it is moving forward ambitiously, and the first datasets should be ready to go online within the coming year. In the meantime, you can check out this citizen-led effort to aggregate and share datasets from various Canadian government departments. Communities of practice FTW.