Kevin Barbieux, “The Homeless Guy”, takes note of the growing lines for feedings from the Salvation Army.
The Salvation Army was there for my family when I was young. As a host for my Cub Scouts pack. As a place we could afford to shop. As a provider of a Santa Claus that would visit us to deliver toys when Mom didn’t have the money to afford to buy them.
So when you see those people ringing those bells and asking for money, realize, the Salvation Army helps. More than you can imagine.
In Episode 6 of “Shadow World”, David S. Kessler took a break from giving interviews to let the location speak for itself – Front and Berks – the Berks El Station.
I can still recall the elderly man following me from the train station, as the sun was setting, when I was just a kid. He propositioned me for a blow job. He said he would pay me money. I walked faster and acted as if I couldn’t hear him. Eventually, he got the hint.
Right around that corner, on a different day, maybe that same year, I was jumped and earned one of the broken noses I’d keep as souvenirs of my days in Fishtown and Kensington.
David S. Kessler’s effort, to me, qualifies as a powerful act of journalism. One that provides insight into a world many of us in Philadelphia are familiar with, but to those on the outside, would have a hard time fathoming.
He spent a year recording short, under five minute, video interviews with those he met under the Frankford El in Kensington. Philadelphia Weekly wrote about the effort last year but you can experience it yourself at undertheheel.blogspot.com.
Another great piece of journalism that documents the true life story of four teens who commit murderer in Fishtown is “Fishtown”. It was was recently published in hardback. You can read more about “Fishtown” at Geekadelphia.
Update 11-30-08: Alfred Lubrano, in the Inquirer, writes about Witness to Hunger, a program of Drexel University that distributed digital cameras to 40 women in North Philly who documented their stories, and in the process exposed realities of living in poverty in North Philadelphia. Make sure to visit the site.
Imagine if the project’s next step was to enable these families to publish to Flickr and YouTube next. It would enable them to reach wider audiences and raise awareness so much further.
Fred Clark offers up his theory as to why things are as dire as they are for the newspaper industry – that the expectation for profit margins has been grown to something unrealistic these past twenty years: Why oh why can’t we have a better press corps?:
So why oh why don’t we have a better press corps?
Part of the answer to that question is that our newspapers are being asked to do something they were never designed to do and something they are fundamentally and structurally incapable of doing: they’re being asked to provide shareholders with double-digit and ever-increasing profit margins.
This is a ridiculous expectation. If you are an investor looking for a 15- or 20-percent return on your investment and you’ve purchased newspaper stock, then you’re a bad investor. You are, in fact, a stupid and a silly investor. You have invested in the wrong thing for the wrong reasons and you are expecting the wrong results. You are expecting impossible results.
Newspapers have a solid and reliable, but modest, business model. Owning a newspaper — even now, even with competition from cable news and the Internet, and even with Craigslist all but eliminating the classified ad market — is like owning a license to print money. But only a modest amount of money. Buying newspaper stock is thus much like investing in CDs. It’s safe, but humble.
Remember the Savings & Loan debacle of the 1980s? That’s what’s happening right now with newspapers.
Amy Webb is wondering why so many are arguing about arguments instead of focusing on what really counts (I am guilty as charged unfortunately) : Reshaping the Conversation:
Raise your hands: Who’s got an hour today to learn about the geospatial web? What about reality mining using cellular data? What about semantic tagging? 2d barcodes? Mobile frameworks using advanced SMS?
That’s what I thought.
Here’s the real problem facing our newsrooms. Most people are out there playing checkers while companies like Google and Adobe are playing chess. NOTHING WILL CHANGE in journalism unless the conversation is refocused on what matters most: How can the ever-hastening disruptive change be either met or overcome by adapting technology and creative business models?
Jeff Jarvis: The perils of publicness:
There’s an old social norm at work here that is, I think, an extension of old media, which says: You put yourself out there, so you put yourself at risk for getting attacked. This implies it is almost your fault for getting attacked. This is a basis of the public-figure defense in libel, the presumed right to go after people in the public eye. Once you become public, you give up the cloak and protection of privacy.
But now we are all public. Does that norm still hold online, when 180 million people have started blogs and countless more put videos on YouTube and photos on Flickr? Are they all, should they all be targets for the snipers and snarkers? Well, they all could be. But what’s our attitude about that? Is there a new norm emerging?
Bruce Schneier: The Future of Ephemeral Conversation:
Until our CEOs blog, our Congressmen Twitter, and our world leaders send each other LOLcats – until we have a Presidential election where both candidates have a complete history on social networking sites from before they were teenagers- we aren’t fully an information age society.
When everyone leaves a public digital trail of their personal thoughts since birth, no one will think twice about it being there. Obama might be on the younger side of the generation gap, but the rules he’s operating under were written by the older side. It will take another generation before society’s tolerance for digital ephemera changes.
rc3.orgWhen everything is recorded:
What I wonder, though, is whether we’re going to see some kind of crest in terms of how harshly people are punished for their previous online behavior. When there are embarrassing photos of everyone online, then by definition their existence will no longer be sensational.
Yep. Me too. Reaching that crest will be painful, ugly, and people are going to be hurt. I still don’t know if we will go over that ledge however, to reach the other side that Jarvis says is already here or Schneier says is on the way someday.
Dave Rogers: Blind Faith:
As the stock market continues its free fall into the Clinton era, and the economic news grows worse and worse, we are cheered by the report of a study that indicates that “Teenagers’ Internet Socializing Not a Bad Thing.” Of course, irony being the fifth fundamental force of the universe, that little online headline was placed immediately across from this one: “Woman Who Posed as Boy Testifies in Case That Ended in Suicide of 13-Year-Old.”
John Scalzi: Technology Changes, People Not So Much:
Technology changes, social trends change, hairstyles change, but people – the actual human animals inside all that technology, sociology and tonsorial grooming — are the same as they have been for thousands of years. Grab a time machine, go back to ancient Egypt, and swap an infant there with an infant from today, and in twenty years you’ll likely find two people perfectly well integrated into their cultures because there is no difference in the human animal between now and then. Even within generations (which are an artificial construct in themselves, but never mind that now) there’s enough variation to drive you a little batty: The same generation that gave us the hippies went for Nixon in 1972, and that same generation gave us both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Go figure.
Jon Udell: Carl Hewitt on cloud computing, scalable semantics, and Wikipedia:
In one of the most striking moments in that talk, Carl says:
“What can I change? Just me. For anything else, I send a message, I say please, and I hope for the best.”
Then he laughs and adds:
“Does this sound like some circumstances you are familiar with?”
Having thought deeply, for 40 years, about the intersection of computation and human affairs, he has arrived at an elegant synthesis: The same organizational and communication patterns govern both realms.
NYTimes: Nebraska Revises Child Safe Haven Law:
The Legislature on Friday revised an unusual law permitting parents to hand children up to age 18 over to state custody without prosecution, instead limiting its reach to infants up to 30 days old.
The original law, enacted earlier this year, was intended to protect newborns from being abandoned or killed by panicked young mothers. But since Sept. 1, to the shock of officials and the public in Nebraska, 35 older children, many from 10 to 17 years in age, have been dropped off at hospitals. Most were left by desperate parents who said the children were uncontrollable and violent and needed more counseling or psychiatric services than they could find or pay for.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Cognitive Science:
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study of mind and intelligence, embracing philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, linguistics, and anthropology. Its intellectual origins are in the mid-1950s when researchers in several fields began to develop theories of mind based on complex representations and computational procedures. Its organizational origins are in the mid-1970s when the Cognitive Science Society was formed and the journal Cognitive Science began. Since then, more than sixty universities in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia have established cognitive science programs, and many others have instituted courses in cognitive science.
No one is above criticism, but the knock Jeff Jarvis took from Slate from Ron Rosenbaum missed the mark badly. It attempted to paint Jarvis as just another new media guru in pursuit of a buck it at the expense of others. Jarvis responded here. Many of Jeff Jarvis’s ideas are very much up for debate – I don’t think journalists are anywhere near as responsible over what’s happening as much as he does (shortsighted publishers, corporations, management, business and technology changes are *far* more to blame (read “The Innovator’s Dilema” – NOW)) and his tone can be brutal in the face of so much pain (so many jobs lost, so many families thrown into upheaval), but he’s willing to debate his ideas and seek out those of others. The author went personal and attempted to de-legitimize ongoing efforts that Jarvis has been leading that are important to journalism, like the recent conference on the future of news at CUNY or hosting so much relevant conversation on his blog. It’s a shame because argument is needed to address where we were, where we are going, what the consequences are. Blunt, honest talk. The Slate piece was a distraction from that.
Related:
Steve Outing: Do newspapers have 6 more months?
Nick Denton: A 2009 Internet Media Plan
Wired: Poll: Internet, Fox News Are Most Trusted News Sources
Silicon Alley Insider: Record Traffic Not Saving Financial News Sites
Metafilter: Can nonprofit news models save journalism?
Jeff Jarvis: Saving Journalism (and killing the press)
And, because this vid is so fit for the Daily Show, I just have to share it (vegetarians – do NOT click this):
“Advertising is social psychology. To understand how advertising affects people, you have to understand why people follow the group and how the brain works.” – Ad Savvy on Philip Zimbardo, whose talk at TED explains how ordinary people can become monsters.
TED: Philip Zimbardo: How ordinary people become monsters … or heroes
WashingtonPost: Bytes of Life: For Every Move, Mood and Bodily Function, There’s a Web Site to Help You Keep Track
Jeff Jarvis: The perils of publicness
The Atlantic: He Saw It Coming: The forgotten filmmaker who anticipated our modern media madness:
…the world his early films anticipated is the world we inhabit now. Like no filmmaker before or since, Watkins captures the constant manipulation and countermanipulation of the modern media, the push-pull of image projection and message management that has blurred the line between news and propaganda. His films are testaments to central truths of the current media environment: that mere logic is powerless against a brilliant projection of personality, that self-conscious “objectivity” and truth-telling are very different things, and that compelling narrative is impervious to facts. From the selling of the Iraq War to the selling of Sarah Palin, Watkins, like Orwell before him, shows how we are lied to, and how we lie to ourselves.
Furious Seasons: FDA Panel Slams Antipsychotic Use In Kids, Teens
NYTimes: What Has Driven Women Out of Computer Science?:
At least we know one thing: it’s possible to have about the same number of men and women in computer science classes. That just about describes classrooms of 25 years ago.
Malcom Gladwell’s new book is getting trashed by some rather big name bloggers. Me thinks they doth protest too much because – for once – one of his books runs counter to Web’s domineering libertarian culture. If you’ve read “Blink”, read “Tipping Point” – what I consider a far better book and more applicable to the Web. His new one, named “Outliers” looks like a must read.
To Watch: “Strive For Happiness” – a documentary about sensitive subject matter – what the lives are like for those in families with loved ones dealing with mental illness.
A question to think about – will Britney Spears’s struggle with mental illness make it easier to talk about it?