Chris Boese's Weblog

Sometimes I can really OD on all this reclaimed Modernist design crap

Can you tell I'm reading Dwell magazine instead of cleaning and organizing my office so I can actually get some work done?

There's just this one ad spread I keep coming back to, Poliform (Varenna, whatever that means). Good god, its animated whoo ha keeps going on and on forever on the web site.

I like it fine, I guess, but mostly like the idea of that design style in my bedroom, I think. The bed style is really cool. And I like the idea of all that shelf space.
You'd never get to hang up any photos or artwork tho, would you?

The real reservation I have for all this rediscovered modernist design promoted by Dwell magazine and The Dwell Home is the memory of a feeling I used to get in the 1970s and 1980s upon entering homes that were thoroughly modernist (and this rebirth of modernism dances with an edge of early to mid 1960s nostalgia, doesn't it seem sometimes?).

Ach. I mean, what is next? Elongated star clocks and wall sconces?

No, what I really mean is, for how cool and well-designed Dwell magazine is, my overriding sense is that if you were to walk into some of these featured homes ten years from now, you'd be right on the edge of that creepy feeling you get in the Jungle Room at Graceland.

Yes, I know the Jungle Room, with the green shag carpet on the walls and all is NOT modernist (is more 1977 than even late 1960s, although I think the yellow TV room is frozen in the late 1960s), but what I'm after is that creepy feeling of choking on an old fad.

I'm just not sure this attraction to boxy, spare design, as pretty as it might seem to me right now (the prefab stuff is really interesting, and if it had more cleverness and innovation, you know, like radiant flooring, solar panels, integration with nature and the environment and climate of the areas built in, so that the design fit more with the sustainable living movement, then I could REALLY get into it. But so much of the stuff the magazine showcases looks like it was plunked down into the landscape from outer space, very little organic or humanist about it at all. Is it so nuts to want organic-centered modernist design?), I really doubt any of these styles will age well at all.

opinionated today, eh?
Chris

NY Times: Panoptic Schools

Cameras Watching Students, Especially in Biloxi. Fears of violence have spurred a trend to outfit public schools with the same surveillance cameras used in Wal-Marts to catch thieves. By Sam Dillon. [New York Times: NYT HomePage]

That has made virtually everything that happens at any of Biloxi's 11 public schools subject to instant replay, though so far, principals report, they have used such replays to confront only humdrum problems like clarifying the disappearance of a child's ice cream money or ensuring that students do not sleep in class.

"It's like truth serum," said Dr. Laurie A. Pitre, principal of North Bay Elementary, who frequently peeks in on her classrooms from a computer monitor in her office. "When we have a he-said, she-said situation, 9 times out of 10 all we have to do is ask children if they want us to go back and look at the camera, and they fess up."

[...]

"Putting cameras on children trains them to believe that being watched every minute of the day is O.K., that Big Brother is O.K.," said Steve Lilienthal, a director at the conservative Free Congress Foundation, based in Washington. "They should be teaching them to behave not because a camera is on them, but because it's the right thing to do."

[...]

In many towns, though, cameras are becoming a routine schoolhouse fixture, installed above drinking fountains and laboratory tables with little or no public notice. No laws appear to specifically regulate their use in schools, some of which, as in Canton, Miss., are financing their purchase with federal money.

[...]

But Biloxi is different: nine casinos pay a gambling tax that has helped finance a $70 million school construction program, including $2 million to install 800 cameras in four new schools and seven existing ones.

"Our whole purpose was to make our schools safer," Dr. Larry Drawdy, the superintendent of schools here, said in an interview.

Biloxi has never had acute difficulty with violent or unruly students, however, and it appears that the most serious problems resolved through use of the cameras concerned infractions by custodians.

[...]

Though no union has bargaining rights for Biloxi teachers, some of them belong to the American Federation of Teachers. Maryann L. Graczyk, who heads the union's Mississippi local, said that at a recent meeting, she heard Biloxi teachers express concerns about the cameras' effects on children and about how the cameras might be used in evaluating teachers' work.

Dr. Drawdy said the cameras were not used to evaluate teachers, and would not be.

What a radical idea: the future will be hyperlinked

OJR article: News Sites Loosen Linking Policies

Whoo hooo! I got a big laugh from this story. It dramatically illustrates the old media disconnect with the online world. They took off-line products of mass media, print or broadcast, and just punted them whole online with the same policies, biases, and assumptions they held in the old media world, not understanding that an essential property of online spaces is hyperlinked interactivity. ROFLOL.

News sites that once staunchly refused to link offsite -- especially to competitor sites -- are now testing the waters with offsite links in blogs and e-mail newsletters.

Mark Glaser
Posted: 2003-09-17

There was a time in the not too distant past when news sites had a very proprietary view of their content. The focus was on collecting eyeballs, and any link that sent readers offsite was frowned upon. A link that went to a competitor's site was almost treasonous.

Times have changed. Slowly, linking policies at news Web sites are loosening up. We're entering an era with an almost "open source" linking policy at some major news sites, which are getting offsite-link religion.

In a counter-intuitive quest for "stickiness" (that odd concept that revealed how backward and strange the dot.com boom really was), these sites tried to make themselves islands, separate from the webbed environment they entered. They suppressed and monitored unvarnished voices.

And their concept of the link was most peculiar. Rather than the coin of the realm that it is, these old media content sites tried to harness the link as a tool of exclusivity and the mind-set of shortage and hoarding, gates and gatekeeping.

In short, these sites, by only linking in-house (and setting up subscription models with various fee structures, etc), seemed to be doing the equivalent of setting up a bottled water franchise in a rain forest. And they wondered why folks scratched their heads and went on linking about the universe without them?

Or, imagine a big plant setting up shop in your hometown, but insisting on building its own roads, which naturally would not connect to any of the town's roads. Of course the town would have the option of connecting to the plant's 4-lane circular perimeter etc, but the plant would not willingly connect to any of the town's roads, well, unless another company in the town, the hardware store, say, paid them for a road just to the hardware store and back.

The well-known blogger, Jeff Jarvis, has a fun way of stating the obvious:

"Outside linking is not only not a problem, not only a non-issue, it's a necessity; it's Web-smart; it's what the audience expects of us," says Advance.net president and creative director Jeff Jarvis, a blogging advocate. "Look at the popularity and utility of Weblogs -- which edit the Web for you -- and you can see that the more we find good resources on the Web for our readers, the better it is for our readers and for us."

Advance.net runs a series of regional sites such as NJ.com for New Jersey and NOLA.com for New Orleans. If you go to NOLA.com's Weblog page, there's a dizzying list of local blogs, including three in-house blogs and a Weblogs forum. Jarvis says his bloggers have the freedom to link to competing and complementary news sources -- as long as it serves the reader.

"If you serve your readers well, they will recognize that and come back to your site first," he said via e-mail. "If you make your readers' lives difficult, they will start elsewhere the next time they look for something. So 'losing' one page view to someone else's story is only an investment in the relationship with the reader; it's far more important to gain readers' loyalty for frequent return visits than it is to underserve them once."

But below is the point of view that gives me the biggest laugh:

Beyond a monolithic view

That view makes a lot of sense, but it means a shift from the monolithic viewpoint of old-school news organizations that feel their news is the only news that matters. Most top U.S. news sites still restrict their offsite links in stories. Though NYTimes.com is starting to open up, its worldview remains slightly narrow.

"We don't typically link to outside sites for news content," said Christine Mohan, spokesperson for NYTimes.com. "Our goal is to be a full-service news site, so on the news verticals we primarily offer Times articles. We choose not to link to other news sites because either we have the content ourselves, or we will post a wire link until a Times report becomes available via our Continuous News Desk."

The idea that content providers exist in a vacuum when they presume to cover the world but not link to it is the oddest thing, along with the notion that a comprehensive news organization SHOULD be all its audience will ever need. That may be an admirable business and news gathering goal, but it betrays a lie, a lie perpetuated by news organizations that pride themselves on their credibility. The reporters find information from all manner of sources, and to try to tell readers that that news organization alone is THE SOURCE, the only place they ought to get their news, tries to force the audience to live in an odd anachronism, going to the bottled water vendor exclusively while living in a rain forest, so to speak.

And news organizations insist on doing it in the name of credibility, because the old media model suggests that if they link to something, their fact checkers have verified every piece of information on that link (and any information that link may have slept with?).

Adrian Holovaty, lead developer for the Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World Web site, says his site's open linking philosophy has actually improved their credibility as a one-stop solution for people who want Lawrence-related news.

"The best example I can think of is our coverage of the hiring of a new basketball coach at KU (University of Kansas)," he said. "We knew that Jayhawk fans from across the country would be checking our site every five minutes, hungry for any updates, so we gladly provided deep links to outside coverage as a service to our readers. You know what? It worked. That coverage resulted in some of the highest traffic numbers KUsports.com had ever seen."

Now that online news has been around for 10 years, perhaps it's time to put away those�proprietary ideas about offsite linking. With the successful lead of so many smaller sites, maybe the big players are starting to come around to a more open source view of news, and placing real value on news digests, Weblogs and features that link outside the box.

Sooo, is it a bigger story that old school news organization are changing their policies and recognizing that they are perpetuating a scarcity model in a webbed environment of info horn O plenty, or is the story that they were blind enough to have the gate-keeping/hoarding model for information in the first place?

Metafilter: Another Bush Tall Tale

This is worth quoting in its entirety.

Another Bush Tall Tale. "Mostly, we've been watching the president's rhetoric spring leaks in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So perhaps we haven't paid enough attention to how many holes have popped open in his domestic socks. Joblessness that was supposed to be stanched by the Bush tax cuts. Urban food kitchens overwhelmed by the demand from people who are working but underemployed and end up out of money three weeks into the month. A domestic Peace Corps program (AmeriCorps) that is praised publicly by the president as admirable volunteerism but is being starved of money by the White House and congressional Republicans. But, still, you wouldn't think he would stiff children and their schooling. That's maybe the most disappointing thing this president has done here at home."

Looks like the "No Child Left Behind/'accountability is the true foundation of education reform'/Texas education miracle" is just another Texas tall tale. [MetaFilter]

Boing Boing on Franken's Supply-Side Jesus

I read this whole bit on Supply Side Jesus, which is just hilarious. Should be required reading for everyone.

Franken's Supply-Side Jesus.

One of the funniest bits in Al Franken's brilliant and scathing Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right is the comic-strip "Supply-Side Jesus." Now the strip's online -- enjoy!

Link

[Boing Boing Blog]

What it would take to get me to switch from Mac OSX to Windoze

Thanks for the thought, John Robb!

One thing Microsoft should do is commission Cyan, the designers of Myst/Riven, to build fully immersive wallpapers for Longhorn.  What a blast that would be.  Waves, tides, wind, birds, sound, etc.   Winter, summer, spring, and fall. [John Robb's Weblog]