If you’ve read BFD for any length of time (as little as a month), you know I subscribe to Otis White’s Civic Strategies newsletter. Guess what? This month, Cleveland completely escaped mentioned. On one hand, there was nothing bad to report which is a good thing. On the other, nothing good happened, which doesn’t make me very happy. Maybe next month…
Powerful stuff:
“When they write the account of the 2004 campaign, it will include at least one word that has never appeared in any presidential history: blog. Whether or not it elects the next president, the blog may be the first innovation from the Internet to make a real difference in election politics. But to see just why requires a bit of careful attention.Politics has always been about engaging people to act. It is still that today. But for the past 50 years, the most efficient tool for engaging people to action (however lethargic) has been broadcast media. The key to victory has been mainlining a message through as many outlets of media as possible. Broadcasting is the drug; the bigger pusher usually wins.
Yet over time, we grow immune. Surrounded by images pushing every passion imaginable, the only sane response is to develop increasingly thick walls to block them out. One result: Broadcast has become increasingly weak. Still, candidates compete using the tools of broadcasters, since victory is always just relative. But the weakened power of broadcast politics creates a strong incentive to develop an alternative.
Enter the blog, a space where people gab. As implemented by most campaigns, it is a place where candidates gab down to the people.
But when done right, as the Howard Dean campaign apparently is doing, the blog is a tool for building community. The trick is to turn the audience into the speaker. A well-structured blog inspires both reading and writing. And by getting the audience to type, candidates get the audience committed. Engagement replaces reception, which in turn leads to real space action. The life of the Dean campaign on the Internet is not really life on the Internet. It’s the activity in real space that the Internet inspires.
None of this works unless the blog community is authentic. And that requires that members feel they own their gabbing space. A managed community works about as well as a managed economy. So the challenge is to find a way to build community without the community feeling built.”
“Nortel Networks is planning trials of a novel public WLAN architecture designed to drive down costs of transporting data between Wi-Fi hotspots and wired broadband networks. The trials are being jointly conducted by U.K. operator British Telecom and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”
Is anyone else wondering why British Telecom is working with MIT, and not an American country? Do you think is has something to do with the fact that American Telecoms aren’t getting into WiFi as quickly as their European counterparts?
I saw a PSA for Americans for the Arts today. You really should check out Chuck D asking if your kids get enough art. Chuck D says “Arts education is key”. Word.
From the NY Times today:
“Yukio Sakamoto, the president and chief executive in Tokyo, believes that using titles like ‘department chief’ impedes decision-making and innovation.‘To call someone `president’ is to deify him,’ said Mr. Sakamoto, who was influenced by the 28 years he worked at Texas Instruments. ‘It’s part of Japan’s hierarchical society. Now that has no meaning. If you have ability, you can rise to the top and show your ability.’
Many Japanese companies, traditionally divided rigidly by age and seniority, have dropped the use of titles to create a more open � and, they hope, competitive � culture.
The long economic slump has forced companies to abandon seniority in favor of performance, upsetting the traditional order. This has led to confusion in the use of titles as well as honorific language, experts say.
The shift also mirrors profound changes in Japanese society, experts say. Equality-minded parents no longer emphasize honorific language to their children, and most schools no longer expect children to use honorific language to their teachers. As a result, young Japanese have a poor command of honorific language and do not feel compelled to use it.
‘There’s confusion and embarrassment,’ said Rika Oshima, the 43-year-old president of Speaking Essay, a school that instructs new employees on the use of honorific language. ‘Junior staffers aren’t strict about using respectful forms to their bosses, whereas bosses want their staffers to use respectful forms to them, but bosses cannot say that.’ “
Since I don’t have a Wiki Wednesday page, I’ll ask you to leave a comment. How do you think the language we use here in America impedes decision-making and innovation?
Bill Callahan writes:
“I had a long talk a couple of years ago with a young woman who worked as a housekeeper at the Ritz-Carlton, cleaning up after guests who paid up to $300 a night. She described a very demanding job where pay started at about $7 an hour and rose to $9 only at the top of a competitive ‘incentive’ scale. The workers were virtually all Black, Hispanic or recent immigrants; many did not speak English. She had family members and friends at the Marriott who were working in the same circumstances.These two hotels were flagship projects of the ’80s, built with heavy tax abatements to ‘revitalize the hospitality industry’ and ‘create good jobs for residents’. What they created was dead-end jobs at $14-15,000 a year — less than the City’s definition of a Living Wage that’s acceptable for subsidized projects –with no prospect of improvement. (Of the 2,500 hotel rooms built downtown since 1980, a grand total of 140 are cleaned by workers with union representation.)
When we talk about preserving and creating ‘hospitality sector’ jobs for uneducated Cleveland residents, these hotels — and the restaurants around them — are what we’re talking about. That’s downtown poverty development. We’ve had lots of it in the past twenty years, during which the City has become — predictably — poorer.
If we’re going to spend a lot of public money to benefit uneducated Cleveland workers, as Dean Rosentraub argues, there is another possible strategy: We could spend it to help them get educated and qualified for all those better jobs in technology, finance and health care. “
Bill quips, “For some reason, nobody is calling for ‘leadership’ in that direction.”
I responded that he is. I know for a fact Tony Houston is too. Hopefully, others will hear the drumbeat.
From the Nimbus Blog:
“Oh yeah, and have we mentioned that Nimbis now offers free WIFI access. We are still running some tests, but over all the connections pretty stable. Stable enought that you can even wander over to our friendly neighbors at The Near West Tea and Coffee House, grab a cup of what-ever-suits-you and check our our site and this blog.”
Thanks, Colin. You adding it to the list, Steve?
I realized that I had snapped. I had crossed a line. I had soaked up so much honking and road rage that I had become the honking. I had become the rage. Though my righteous, egg-flinging fury felt sweet and just, my angry response escalated the cycle of frustration and honk-violence. It only made things worse. But I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to do something. So, a few weeks later, after another particularly rotten day of horn blasting, I sat down and came up with my first batch of honku — haiku poems about honking.
Colin Toke reacts to this week’s Free Times column Can the Creative Class Save Cleveland?
Why does the so called “Creative Class” or as I like to think of myself, an Arts Friendly person, need to save Cleveland? Why do I need to, and why would I? In the beginning of the article it even mentions how most of the people the Freetimes interviewed are use to doing stuff on their own or with the help of their friends, and not relying government funding. Why should the newly spotlighted army of Cleveland artists come out and ally themselves with a city that hasn’t really been there for them in the past? Why should I help a city that hasn’t helped me?
I’m glad to see successful artists like Colin pushing back on the matter. It’s going to take a renew effort from all of us to grow the economy, not just a few arts friendly people.
Hey George,
802.11 just crossed the Cuyahoga!
Both Borders Westlake and Arabica Rocky River are now WiFi… free for a while. I am @ Arabica with my PowerBook.
Here are two articles worth blogging…
– http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~anno/papers/terman.html
– http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~anno/papers/limits_autarky.htmlBoth by AnnaLee Saxenian… a regional economics guru @ Berkely… and a big fan of networked entrepreneurship. Her book, “Regional Advantage” explains how SV succeeded and Boston Route 128 did not in the race to be the leader of high tech. Her theory? Boston [like Cleveland] remained hierarchical/top down/detailed plans while SV looked for networks/cross-border polination/emergence/risk. The best networked region wins — computer networks are in place for human networks to happen and prosper.
Valdis
Just in case you’ve forgotten about how powerful words are, this remainder from Kottke.org:
“George Lakoff tells how conservatives use language to dominate politics: “With Republicans controlling the Senate, the House, and the White House and enjoying a large margin of victory for California Governor-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger, it’s clear that the Democratic Party is in crisis. George Lakoff, a UC Berkeley professor of linguistics and cognitive science, thinks he knows why. Conservatives have spent decades defining their ideas, carefully choosing the language with which to present them, and building an infrastructure to communicate them, says Lakoff.”
From KurzweilAI.net:
What do traffic jams, obesity and spam have in common?They are all problems caused by abundance in a world more attuned to scarcity. By achieving the goal of abundance, technology renders the natural checks and balances of scarcity obsolete.
OK. I’m probably geekin’ out too much and could use an intervention. I’m linking to a freeware program that verifies the integrity of the data you’ve ftp’d for large files. Why? I’m downloading Knoppix. What’s that? It’s a linux distro that runs from a CD. It’s my little way of check out the fringe while sticking with XP.
Whilst I’m wait for XP to re-install on my new Dell laptop (Don’t even ask. It’s how you fix it from going into standby when it’s booting up), I thought I’d read Thomas Mulready’s FT Column:
Last week, the Associated Press announced that Michigan�s governor was launching a �Cool Cities� initiative to attract young professionals. A while back, our governor wrote a check for $100 million attempting to save a dying steel mill. We�ve been confused in this town into thinking that bigger is better, that projects like Gateway and Browns Stadium will stimulate our local economy (they haven�t), or that big companies like BP Oil and TRW would lead us into a renaissance (they left town). Instead, we�re finally starting to realize that small and medium-sized businesses, and the entrepreneurs that start them, will be Cleveland�s future, if we can only learn how to attract them. We already have the cultural assets and lifestyle that entrepreneurs want. We just have to learn how to put them at the top of our efforts to sell Cleveland, not at the bottom. Everyone repeat: Information Age, not Industrial Age. Participatory recreation, not big-league sports. Arts festivals, not rib cook-offs. Culture, not cheap cost of living. Galleries and museums, not assembly lines.
I think he pretty much nailed this one.
That’s how many pages I’ve read of Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson. Enjoyed every minute of it too.
Dave Bayless sent me an email about our meeting with June Holley. He asked me this question, and with his permisssion, I’m passing it along to you for some discussion:
What are entrepreneurs and other creatives in Cleveland looking for in the built community?
With stems from a post on one of his discussion boards, which is link to in the title of this post
Neil Takemoto founded CoolTown Studios to give entrepreneurs and other creatives a voice in designing the built communities in which they live and to connect that voice with real estate developers and investors who are eager to listen.What do you want to see in your community that could make it a more entrepreneurially vibrant place? How could the distinctiveness of your community be expanded upon in a manner that attracts other entrepreneurs as well as talented employees?
Make sure you check out the CoolTown Studio site. It’s a blog, so I’ve added it to the BFD blogroll and since they’re publishing XML (reminder: you should be too) they’re also in my feed reader.
Or don’t vote, like the majority of Americans:
“The people are responsible for the character of their Congress. If that body be ignorant, reckless, and corrupt, it is because the people tolerate ignorance, recklessness, and corruption. If it be intelligent, brave, and pure, it is because the people demand these high qualities to represent them in the national legislature.” - James A. Garfield, 1831 - 1881
