Good Morning World!

They say that the average blog has only 6 readers, so I’m sending this personal message out to all 3 of you today. My more public morning greeting went out on Twitter, then a less public one shows up on Facebook. Down the hierarchy of social contact to this more intimate setting, my blog. The place where I used to broadcast thoughts and ideas. How did this humble little blog become even more humble? How did it lose its status in the celestial spheres of the interweb and their constant machinations? Was it my neglect? Or have things actually irrevocably changed?

I vote for change, as they said in the Obama campaign what seems like eons ago. The whole game has changed and my patterns of communication have changed with it. So there isn’t much responsibility with this blog anymore. The shift to microblogging is complete. Leaving this blog, like radio, to its own devices, because who cares anyways. On the other hand, maybe it was always just a little voice out there in space, my blog posts like the barking of poor Laika the space dog drifting beyond the planetary into the nebular. I don’t think Laika made it that far actually. I’m not even sure if I’m spelling her name correctly. And this shows how far down this blog has come. Now I don’t even google to find the correct spelling.

If you want to know what I’m really doing follow my Twitter feed – oh sorry, I haven’t kept that up much lately. Too busy with life itself! Here’s an image of Shamcher holding the OTEC model, while I skype with Nirtan in Victoria.

Guess: when and who!

Guess when was this said and who said it!

 The service environments available to ordinary persons,
whether of travel or general consumer services, far exceed the power
of any private wealth to provide for itself. The richest men have
become hotel hermits, unable to find any more conspicuous means of
consumption than those that are adapted to their personal or commer-
cial security. If personal wealth has become a comic and frustrating
encumbrance in a world of universal public services, the school and
university are in an equally paradoxical situation insofar as they
are committed to providing packaged information on a wide variety of
subjects. Today the general public has access to every kind of infor-
mation--quite independently of our educational programs.

        This new electric access to information has suddenly cast
the audience in the role, not of spectator or consumer, but of ex-
plorer and investigator. The immediate need and future of education
is not in the dissemination of knowledge, but of ignorance. The open
university of the U. K. made the ordinary mistake of putting the old
curriculum and old classroom on the new TV media. The immediate need
is for these media to bring to the microphone and the studio people
from every field of knowledge and endeavour to explain to the public
not their knowledge but their ignorance, not their expertise but their
hang-ups, not their breakthroughs but their break-downs. The universi-
ty and school of the future must be a means of total community partici-
pation, not in the consumption of available knowledge, but in the crea-
tion of completely unavailable insights. The overwhelming obstacle to
such community participation in problem solving and research at the top
levels, is the reluctance to admit, and to describe, in detail their
difficulties and their ignorance. There is no kind of problem that baf-
fles one or a dozen experts that cannot be solved at once by a million
minds that are given a chance simultaneously to tackle a problem. The
satisfaction of individual prestige which we formerly derived from the
possession of expertise, must now yield to the much greater chores and
satisfactions of dialogue and group discovery.

Yes, it was 1971 and the speaker was Marshall McLuhan. Convocation Speech, University of Alberta. See the full text here.

Too Much Cuteness!!

I couldn’t resist. This is best cuteness ever! I love that fireplace for kittens…

Hyper-Local on Carrall Street

This post is a duplicate of a page in my Carrall Street Journal.

I started a blog named The Carrall Street Journal in March 2006, and it has been an on and off activity for me. My original ideas for it are listed below. They were a little bit out of scope, and I began to see it simply as a vehicle for my own personal expression of life here in Gastown/DTES. As it was a very personal hyper-local blog, a place-based personal log of my observations, I’ve just now integrated all the posts from the old Carrall Street Journal here into my personal blog.

March 2006, this is what I thought the Carrall Street Journal would be:

• The Carrall Street Journal documents people, events, development and transitions along Carrall Street.

• The Journal offers reflections on the physical and social developments as the greenway plans take hold and become a reality, and is open to any comments and community suggestions.

• Descriptions and profiles feature people, businesses, events and associations located on and near the street.

• The journal is volunteer-based and is an independent voice, with no particular affiliation.

• It doesn’t take any advertising, and isn’t commercial.

• Any member of the community can contribute to the discussion, as long as you have an email address to send from and to be contacted at.

Signs for the Times

I had great fun playing at says-it.com, and lost track of one morning while making signs for the times. Here are a couple, and if they inspire you, let me know and I’ll share or link to yours here, too.

Finally, a Reason to get the i-Phone

Retribalization! Ocarina! blowing on the phone makes beautiful music.

Mindworld Overload

Mindworld overload and altered sensory threshold!

In an intensity of activity on Twitter Monday morning, I was involved in a kind of flood or overflow of following and followers. A Twitter surge. It fried my brain, I was too electrified – all at once too many new follows. I couldn’t digest it all.

Who are these people? Why are we doing this? What’s it for? I asked myself. And for a time, wished to undo it. Just gathering people for no reason is like asking strangers to a party, or like broadcasting on the radio to unseen listeners to a call-in show. Was I an attention-seeking twitterslut?

I realized I’d wanted to decide who, or choose sympatico people in the niche, etc. But why not be open to whoever, whatever, wherever? What’s the harm in being open?

This is the whole idea in the world of social media. How the personal is social media actually, and how social is this network? It is many to many, one to one and one to many all rolled into one.

Maxed out from this bolus of people, I found myself seeking solace in the relatively private world of friendfeed. Set up an account. Maybe there I could have some control! But after sweeping through my Facebook contacts to see who’s on friendfeed, I just gave up for a time, unplugged. It was like reading a phone book. Why do that?

Oh, just one more thing, I thought, and I opened Finnegan’s Wake to find a quote to post to the Open Source Spirit twitterfeed. The book opened to me, the words all (get this!) made sense! I danced with it, mind alert and light. It was never more clear.

The poetic mind was somehow triggered into integrative activity by the factual overload. Social media pushed to its extreme yields the poetic being. At least in me! “HCE” Joyce had said, Here Comes Everybody!

Warning: don’t turn your back on the ocean. Face it so you can tell when the big waves are coming and ride with them. When your back is turned, they can slap you down. (Or you don’t have to even go to the beach, of course.)

Inadvertent National Exposure

James K-M’s art got some inadvertent national exposure during the CTV coverage of the Canadian leadership debate last week. Students from SFU were gathered in the Teck Gallery space at Harbour Centre to give their feedback. Watch as the camera swings to the left: there are his paintings adding some flash and colour to the environment. To see more, go here to his site.

Advertising is Warfare

“We don’t understand information movement and image-making as warfare at all—we call this advertising. Actually, Madison Avenue is a major military operation, vastly aggressive, and out to conquer empires, territories, within the human heart…the human spirit”. – Marshall McLuhan

We look back at those advertising days through Mad Men. McLuhan saw this time as if he were from the future, but he was one of the few who was living in the present.

Culture in Danger

This video is definitely worth sending around;