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  </channel><item rdf:about="https://supernuclear.substack.com/p/stoop-coffee-how-a-simple-idea-transformed?r=iw9zm&amp;triedRedirect=true">
    <title>Stoop Coffee: How a Simple Idea Transformed My Neighborhood</title>
    <dc:date>2025-04-03T19:42:23+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://supernuclear.substack.com/p/stoop-coffee-how-a-simple-idea-transformed?r=iw9zm&amp;triedRedirect=true</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[18 months ago, I wasn’t planning on spending more time hanging out with my neighbors than with friends I’d known for decades. It started with a simple goal: my husband Tyler and I wanted that sense of community that feels like it’s only possible in the suburbs, but we believed we could achieve this while living in San Francisco. We brainstormed: should we make cookies and knock on doors? Should we invite neighbors over for dinner? Ultimately, we landed on sipping coffee on our “stoop”.

Hanging out on a stoop is not a novel concept. Unfortunately, an increasing trend of isolation has resulted in fewer and fewer neighbors gathering to connect with one another. Stooping has provided benefits to so many communities. Why not bring this concept to my own neighborhood?

Tyler and I were already having leisurely weekend morning coffees in our house, so it was an easy pivot to sit outside with our coffees and enjoy the sunshine. And thus our tradition began. Every weekend, we would bring our folding chairs out onto the street – we had to make do since our house doesn’t have a stoop – and enjoy our caffeine. As we saw people entering or exiting their homes, we'd enthusiastically wave them down, introduce ourselves, and write down their names in our shared spreadsheet. I wore a goofy tie-dyed Six Flags hat so people would remember us as “those people” and we started calling this our brand awareness campaign (but of course, we live in SF).
]]></description>
<dc:subject>stoops public_space porches public_sphere local_media gathering</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="https://democracy.psu.edu/events/">
    <title>Events - The McCourtney Institute for Democracy</title>
    <dc:date>2025-04-03T19:38:18+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://democracy.psu.edu/events/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[The Public Sphere of First Drafts
John Durham Peters

The shift of the basis of public life from slow and centralized print and audiovisual media to faster, ubiquitous, distributed, user-generated short-form word and video material has been widely noted.  I want to ask what the new mode of incessant documentation of raw behavior means for the possibility of both forgiveness and the collective learning process essential to public deliberation.  If every word or deed is frozen in its first draft, what then?  Some consequences are the preeminence of the “statement” as a genre or apparently trustworthy speech, the recoding of common knowledge as corrosive secrets whose exposure is worried to have damaging effects, and an obsessive public hermeneutics of small nonverbal gestures at the expense of speech.  Is a reformist or redemptive rethink of this communication infrastructure possible or are we stuck?  This talk might not answer that question, but it will tease it in many ways. ]]></description>
<dc:subject>drafts public_sphere democracy revision</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/public-ownership-of-public-goods">
    <title>Public Ownership of Public Goods - by Hamilton Nolan</title>
    <dc:date>2024-08-17T23:31:04+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/public-ownership-of-public-goods</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[America’s division between public and private services does not follow any rule at all, except this: Under capitalism, the private sector will try to take over all services, always, and only constant government action will keep public services public.

Do I need to say that this is stupid? This is stupid. If you were designing a common sense rule to govern what services should be publicly owned, it would be something like, “The public should own the things that all the public uses.” In fact, I think that if you asked most people, you would find that they already take this for granted, whether they have thought much about it or not. Why is the fire department public and not private? Because anyone might need it at any time. It’s a common good. It makes sense to be publicly owned. This is also why the police department is public. It is why parks are public. It is why the postal service is public. It is why schools are public....

we should have the instinct of taking public goods out of the private market, rather than just asking the government to spend money to help people afford them. Don’t just soothe the profit motive—kill it. Yes, choices have to be made. Priorities have to be set. But there are many examples around the globe of higher tax societies with a much stronger set of publicly owned goods and services that produce a higher quality of life for a greater proportion of their population than we do here....

There is also the common assumption that public systems are naturally shittier than private ones. That is an observation of current reality masquerading as a principle. Yeah, the public systems in America are often shittier, because we allow all the rich people to opt out of them and use private systems and then the public systems are left exclusively for the poor. Make everyone use the public system, and the public system will get better. Duh. ]]></description>
<dc:subject>public_goods commons infrastructure public_sphere</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
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<item rdf:about="https://placesjournal.org/article/the-ends-of-liberalism-patrick-deneen-new-right/">
    <title>The Ends of Liberalism</title>
    <dc:date>2024-08-13T02:13:30+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://placesjournal.org/article/the-ends-of-liberalism-patrick-deneen-new-right/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[According to Thomas, the replacement of the outward-facing front porch with the introverted back patio in new houses across the United States revealed a monumental shift from civic-minded sociability to alienated self-absorption. 1 The story echoed (with some modifications) a theme common in postwar social commentary regardless of political orientation, from David Riesman’s portrait of a “lonely crowd” to Herbert Marcuse’s evisceration of “one-dimensional man.” Thomas’s proposition has more recently gained currency on the academic right, as damning evidence summoned by political theorist Patrick J. Deneen in his 2018 bestseller, Why Liberalism Failed. Diagnosing a longstanding tendency in American culture, Deneen adduces a shift from porch to patio as proof of liberal modernity’s spiritual impoverishment, whereby the pursuit of individual freedoms supersedes that of the “common good.”...

“Our States, not to mention our localities, are ever-less a kind of ‘porch,’ that transition from the world of the home to the public realm of community and eventually State and nation.” 6 In a nod to the management of sexuality that Deneen seems to find irresistible, also gone with the porch are “courtship and marriage proposals within earshot of kin.” In their place remain “devastated landscapes, deep dependence of [sic] foreign powers, and tract housing devoid of real community.” 7...

What he proposes is front-porch localism as Volksgemeinschaft, a ruthlessly nativist vision of purified community. The aim may seem to be post-ideological sociability, “fostered in local settings, focused on the creation of new and viable cultures, economics grounded in virtuosity within households, and the creation of civic polis life.” 8 But this is an artful disguise.]]></description>
<dc:subject>porch liberalism democray public_sphere</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/23/business/chinese-emigres-bookstores-discussions.html">
    <title>Émigrés Are Creating an Alternative China, One Bookstore at a Time - The New York Times</title>
    <dc:date>2024-02-28T01:40:00+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/23/business/chinese-emigres-bookstores-discussions.html</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[From Tokyo and Chiang Mai, Thailand, to Amsterdam and New York, members of the Chinese diaspora are building public lives that are forbidden in China and training themselves to be civic-minded citizens — the type of Chinese the Communist Party doesn’t want them to be. They are opening Chinese bookstores, holding seminars and organizing civic groups.

These émigrés are creating an alternative China, a more hopeful society. In the process, they’re redefining what it means to be Chinese.

Four Chinese bookstores opened in Tokyo last year. A monthly feminist open-mic comedy show that started in New York in 2022 was so successful that feminists in at least four other U.S. cities, as well as London, Amsterdam and Vancouver, British Columbia, are staging similar shows. Chinese immigrants in Europe established dozens of nonprofit organizations focused on L.G.B.T.Q., protest and other issues.

Most of these events and organizations are not overtly political or aimed at trying to overthrow the Chinese government, though some participants hope they will be able to return to a democratic China someday. But the immigrants organizing them say they believe it’s important to learn to live without fear, to trust one another and pursue a life of purpose.]]></description>
<dc:subject>bookstores public_sphere resistance China</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="https://towardfreedom.org/story/archives/americas/the-public-library-manifesto/">
    <title>The Public Library Manifesto - Toward Freedom</title>
    <dc:date>2024-01-01T21:57:29+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://towardfreedom.org/story/archives/americas/the-public-library-manifesto/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[In an age of greed and selfishness, the public library stands as an enduring monument to the values of cooperation and sharing. In an age where global corporations stride the earth, public libraries remains firmly rooted in local communities. In an age of widespread cynicism and distrust of government, the tax-supported public library has widespread, enthusiastic support.

This is not the time to take the word “public” out of the public library. It is time to put it in capitals....

Its mission of protecting our access to information has often led the public library to confront authorities that would obstruct that access.

In 1953, at the height of McCarthism, when magazine like the Nation were banned in many places and William Faulkner’s novels were seized as pornographic literature, the American Library Association (ALA) adopted a Library Bill of Rights. “The freedom to read is of little consequence when expended on the trivia,” it insisted. “Ideas can be dangerous … Freedom itself is a dangerous way of life, but it is ours.”...

In the 1980s and 1990s, when the federal government began giving taxpayer-financed data to private companies, who then copyrighted the information and charged higher prices for access, the library community expressed its displeasure. Then ALA President Patricia Shuman declared, “privatization has resulted in less access and higher cost for the America public. If we accept the commodization of information…we will diminish the public’s right to know.”

Just as fiercely as public librarians fight to protect our access to information, they fight to protect our personal information from prying eyes. In the 1980s, when the FBI tried to turn librarians into spies by asking them to identify those who checked out military or subversive books, Americans librarians firmly rejected the request....

Consider the case of Philadelphia. In 2010 the city spent $33 million on its public libraries, which received another $12 million from other sources. That same year the Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania undertook a detailed analysis of the economic impact of the public library.

Among other things, it found that within 1/4 mile of one of Philadelphia’s 54 branches, the value of a home rose by $9,630. Overall, Philadelphia’s public libraries added $698 million to home values—which in turn generated an additional $18.5 million in property taxes to the City and School District each year. That benefit alone recouped more than half of the city’s investment.

Add to that, the value of 6.5 million items borrowed each year, a value Fels calculated at more $100 million; the value of the 3.2 million reference questions answered; the value of the 1.2 million times people used computer terminals to access information outside the library; and the millions of times people read materials inside the library but did not borrow them.

Add the value of the lessons in computer literacy and English as a second language of after school tutoring.

And then add the hard to quantify intangibles: a safe and warm refuge, concerts and lectures, camaraderie....

Recently, the idea of public ownership has been under attack; Fort Worth’s example shows how effective that attack has been. The city explained that it was dropping the word “public” from the name of its library system because of its “potentially negative connotation.” John Adams wrote in 1776, “There must be a positive passion for the public good, the public interest … established in the minds of the people, or there can be no republican government, nor any real liberty: and this public passion must be superior to all private passions.” Thomas Jefferson agreed, “I profess… that to be false pride which postpones the public good to any private or personal considerations.”

Would it be improper for me to mention the Forth Worth rebranding initiative was mostly paid for by a large oil drilling company?...

An increasing number of library systems have gone beyond name changing to actual privatization of ever-larger parts of their library operations. The biggest player in the library privatization game is Library Systems & Services (LSSI), founded in 1981 to take advantage of President Reagan’s initiative to privatize government services. LSSI now privately manages more than 60 public libraries nationwide and now trails only Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City as an operator of library branches.]]></description>
<dc:subject>libraries commons public_sphere</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/frederick-wiseman-in-paradise?utm_brand=tny&amp;utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_120323&amp;bxid=5cec287524c17c4c646220a9&amp;cndid=12933154&amp;hasha=c1a0032e00fb3c9a854b197149e02af4&amp;hashb=275753fa41727caee915740c3747e4841d1d0374&amp;hashc=bc827ecb2e41f64159edac8be7713f771e2b44dbc56774298838c64e3ab3f40b&amp;esrc=OIDC_SELECT_ACCOUNT_">
    <title>Frederick Wiseman in Paradise | The New Yorker</title>
    <dc:date>2023-12-03T20:21:05+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/frederick-wiseman-in-paradise?utm_brand=tny&amp;utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_120323&amp;bxid=5cec287524c17c4c646220a9&amp;cndid=12933154&amp;hasha=c1a0032e00fb3c9a854b197149e02af4&amp;hashb=275753fa41727caee915740c3747e4841d1d0374&amp;hashc=bc827ecb2e41f64159edac8be7713f771e2b44dbc56774298838c64e3ab3f40b&amp;esrc=OIDC_SELECT_ACCOUNT_</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[In the early years, in such films as “Titicut Follies,” from 1967, about a facility for the criminally insane; “High School,” from 1968, on a soul-defeating public school; and the great “Welfare,” from 1975, about a New York welfare office, he dramatized American organizations that worked viciously against the people they were supposed to serve. In the left’s commentary on Wiseman fifty years ago, he was congratulated for his radical viewpoint. Lincoln Steffens with a camera! Wiseman entered an institution with a tiny crew, shot everything that interested him, captured about twenty-five feet of film for every foot in the finished movie. He took the place’s measure. The thematic elaboration, he always insisted, emerged in the editing, not in the shooting. The early films were tough and sardonic works enhanced by a poetic eye and by many nuances that the political commentators didn’t quite notice—a kind of black-comedy despair over life’s sheer orneriness, its refusal to conform to expectation.

The early political appreciation of Wiseman was inadequate, or at least limited, and he refused to be constrained by it. Even in one of his first movies—“Law and Order” (1969), a portrait of a mostly white Kansas City police force—the viewpoint was more melancholy than accusatory....

Even in the most tangled and unhappy places, Wiseman found noble and kindly gestures, small outbreaks of fortitude and courage—for instance, a doctor gentling a panicked elderly patient in the big-city “Hospital” (1970). Some of these moments, despite Wiseman’s refusal to comment, were packed with more emotion than one could easily handle. In “Blind” (1987), a sightless child eager to show a piece of work to a teacher climbs down a staircase, the camera following after him. It is one of the cinema’s epic journeys, and beyond heartbreak. Here was a filmmaker drawn to hard-pressing human realities impossible to summarize with an easy attitude of any sort. In trying to understand Wiseman, one drew on Dickens, Kafka, and Beckett rather than on the standard texts of social protest. He filmed the underside of an institution and its public face—the low hum of ordinary days, the sullen backwash of furious events, the torn-up betting tickets on the sticky floor of a racetrack after the race was over. In Wiseman’s hands, institutions developed a soul, even an unconscious.]]></description>
<dc:subject>institutions civic_infrastructure documentary television film public_sphere administration</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:8662d9dc3da1/</dc:identifier>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:civic_infrastructure"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:documentary"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:television"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:film"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:administration"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://members.urbanlibraries.org/events/2023/07/19/webinar/civic-engagement-in-uncivil-times/">
    <title>Civic Engagement in Uncivil Times - Urban Libraries Council Member Hub</title>
    <dc:date>2023-07-19T18:45:35+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://members.urbanlibraries.org/events/2023/07/19/webinar/civic-engagement-in-uncivil-times/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[As our society becomes increasingly polarized and the public is inundated with unreliable information, libraries are designing programs and offering resources to facilitate healthy public dialogue around human rights, free expression and civic responsibility.

Two library leaders will share what their libraries are doing to create public squares where all feel welcome. Oak Park Public Library offers programming and resources to help their patrons learn about voting, engaging with public officials, taking part in the political process and evaluating news and information services. Spokane Public Library offers a monthly Civics Salon: Monthly discussions on democracy where the public is invited to discuss what they believe the rights and responsibilities are involved in a healthy citizenry...


    Shari Henry, Director of Democracy and Community Impact, ULC
    Joslyn Bowling Dixon, Executive Director, Oak Park Public Library
    Shane Gronholz, PhD, Current Affairs Specialist, Spokane Public Library
]]></description>
<dc:subject>libraries civic_engagement dialogue discussion public_sphere</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:b786bb5a0575/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:libraries"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:civic_engagement"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:dialogue"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:discussion"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://www.averyreview.com/issues/58/towards-a-new-commons">
    <title>The Avery Review | &lt;i&gt;Towards a New Commons&lt;/i&gt;, Away from Silver Bullets</title>
    <dc:date>2022-10-28T12:21:52+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.averyreview.com/issues/58/towards-a-new-commons</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[Reset: Towards a New Commons, the most recent exhibition at New York’s Center for Architecture (CfA), opened at a moment when the idea of a unified public in the United States seems at best a relic of a bygone era. Between the backlash to the government’s response to COVID-19, the storming of the US Capitol, and the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, divisions rather than commonalities dominate today’s structure of feeling in the United States.

In this context, curators Juliana Barton and Barry Bergdoll asked architects, planners, and professionals from relevant nonarchitectural fields (psychology, healthcare, social sciences) to explore what might draw communities together, and to envision how more united populations might be better served by the built environment. The resulting exhibition included not only designed responses to discrete architectural and urban challenges such as accessibility, gentrification, and disinvestment but also implicit demonstrations of the ways these social forces have begun to alter how architects and designers approach their professional roles in society. Just as the upper levels of government have become less proactive and more reactionary (think dueling executive orders and judicial stays in place of legislation and regulation), a comparable but more desirable shift has taken place in architecture, where the technocratic, singular architectural “solution” is increasingly being revealed as implausible (at best)....

More broadly, a shift away from the single-size solution and toward contextual, sensitive, yet nonetheless inventive and dynamic, interventions presents an opportunity for architects to think big by zooming into already existing conditions. Reset’s teams of academics and practitioners showcase the professional fields of the built environment’s nascent shift away from top-down demonstration projects and form-based squabbles and toward meeting the design problems of the day on a more level footing with the most affected stakeholders....

While the prompt itself did not suggest a source of funding or a specific bureaucratic or legislative imperative that might spark the projects in the exhibition, nor ask teams to propose one, the winning projects do nonetheless engage either currently existing or historical political and social support networks—community groups, advocacy networks, neighborhood plans, and local residents—that might generate these accessible designs, helping to ground them in ongoing local efforts....

Here the implicit message of the exhibition’s call for proposals was on display: it does not take a degree in a design field to notice the signs of civic infrastructure funding shortfalls or repair backlogs; nor is one required to advocate for concrete measures to address discrimination or provide direct services to overlooked communities. In partnering designers with these local experts and non−design professionals, Reset’s design proposals operate in a productive zone between the material, everyday needs of specific sites or interest groups and the freewheeling world of architectural speculation—proving that one does not need to disregard real-world constraints to let the architectural imagination run wild...

Reset found itself in conversation with events like the most recent iteration of the Chicago Architectural Biennial, which abandoned the gilded era trappings of the Loop’s Cultural Center for community-facing lots in Chicago’s West and South Sides; or, in an expanded framework, the writings of Kiel Moe and Jane Hutton, who focus their attention on the flow of materials to and from building sites as registers of sociopolitical changes larger than architecture; and the work of educators like Cruz Garcia and Nathalie Frankowski, whose anti-colonial pedagogy and research turns architectural visualization methods back onto the field to expose historical and active entanglements between architects and repressive, extractive politics.14 The projects in Reset positioned designers as merely a single cog in a much larger machine of urban development, content to push for diffuse, small-scale architectural changes as part of broad coalitions of activists and stakeholders advocating collectively for political change...

If the turn against solutionism holds, Reset provided proof positive that leaving the architectural prestige objects of yesteryear in the dustbin does not mean abandoning drawing, craft, or visual narrative. Through and through, the project teams identified ways to fabricate exquisite models, visionary drawings, and provocative arguments, using similar but slightly different tools to what might have been found in the center’s galleries a generation ago. A conspicuous lack of the blunt “master plan” abounded; teams focused instead on urban corridors, tool kits, or rendering informal networks through isometrics, collage perspectives, and illustrations—buttressed throughout with rigorous research and detailed analysis for those more interested in reading rather than listening or simply looking....

How can the profession of architecture confront the shifts in practice, fee structures, and labor that would be necessary to produce a world where renovation comes before demolition, where public and political reconstruction projects are favored over the desires of private clients?...

The CfA’s stated goals are to expose laypeople and other professionals to the potentials of working with architects.19 In that regard, the Reset teams have done a thorough job of reversing this dynamic and establishing the possibilities of bringing architects to communities with established needs and community-defined goals. One wonders if the center’s roommates, the AIA, have taken notice....

perhaps a new role for architects and design professionals will be as coordinators, facilitators, and record-keepers in support of our neighbors, uplifting and promoting the necessary work to bring about collective improvements in our public realm, looking both backward to redress hi]]></description>
<dc:subject>architecture commons public_sphere systems accessibility inclusion social_infrastructure civic_design</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:273c7fa678ae/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:architecture"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:commons"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:systems"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:accessibility"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:inclusion"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:social_infrastructure"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:civic_design"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://otherinter.net/research/local-gov/">
    <title>There's a Neighbor for That: On Civic Associations as a Social Technology</title>
    <dc:date>2022-08-04T13:24:27+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://otherinter.net/research/local-gov/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[A year into its ethnographic research of digital governance, Other Internet turns its attention towards an old school social technology: neighborhood associations. The digitization of city life has slowly altered the nature of civic participation, rendering local governance as another suite of apps to interface with. Voluntary associations offer an “autonomous zone” that continues to serve as a buffer against the trend of atomization and the consumerist model of city-citizen relations. They are an often-overlooked but important medium through which citizens can collectively create and maintain local public goods. We interviewed 18 associations in Washington D.C. and Seattle to learn about how they function, how they adapted to wholesale virtualization during the pandemic, and what we can glean from their approach to self-governance.]]></description>
<dc:subject>media_city public_sphere community_networks neighborhoods local_media localism</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:ac0879fd34b6/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:media_city"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:community_networks"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:neighborhoods"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:local_media"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:localism"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://www.noemamag.com/all-that-is-solid-melts-into-information/">
    <title>Philosopher Byung-Chul Han: Information Without Narrative Disrupts Democracy</title>
    <dc:date>2022-05-29T18:58:11+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.noemamag.com/all-that-is-solid-melts-into-information/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[truth, unlike information, has a centripetal force that holds society together. Information, on the other hand, is centrifugal, with very destructive effects on social cohesion. If we want to comprehend what kind of society we are living in, we need to understand the nature of information. 

Bits of information provide neither meaning nor orientation. They do not congeal into a narrative. They are purely additive. From a certain point onward, they no longer inform — they deform. They can even darken the world. This puts them in opposition to truth....

Information goes along with fundamental suspicion. The more we are confronted with information, the more our suspicion grows. Information is Janus-faced — it simultaneously produces certainty and uncertainty. A fundamental structural ambivalence is inherent in an information society. 

Truth, by contrast, reduces contingency. We cannot build a stable community or democracy on a mass of contingencies. Democracy requires binding values and ideals, and shared convictions. Today, democracy gives way to infocracy....

Digital communication redirects the flows of communication. Information is spread without forming a public sphere. It is produced in private spaces and distributed to private spaces. The web does not create a public. 

This has highly deleterious consequences for the democratic process. Social media intensify this kind of communication without community. You cannot forge a public sphere out of influencers and followers. Digital communities have the form of commodities; ultimately, they are commodities.... we might say that there is nothing but information without any hermeneutic horizon for interpretation, without any method of explanation. Pieces of information do not coalesce into knowledge or truth, which are forms of narration....

The narrative vacuum in an information society makes people feel discontent, especially in times of crisis, such as the pandemic. People invent narratives to explain a tsunami of disorienting figures and data. Often these narratives are called conspiracy theories, but they cannot simply be reduced to collective narcissism. They readily explain the world. On the web, spaces open to make experiences of identity and collectivity possible again. The web, thus, is tribalized — predominantly among right-wing political groups where there is a very strong need for identity. In these circles, conspiracy theories are taken up as offers for assuming an identity....

Today, culture is held together solely by instrumental and economic relations. But that does not found communities — it isolates people. Art, in particular, should play a central role in the revitalization of rituals....
What we need most are temporal structures that stabilize life. When everything is short-term, life loses all stability. Stability comes over long stretches of time: faithfulness, bonds, integrity, commitment, promises, trust. These are the social practices that hold a community together. They all have a ritual character. They all require a lot of time. Today’s terror of short-termism — which, with fatal consequences, we mistake for freedom — destroys the practices that require time. To combat this terror, we need a very different temporal politics....

It is possible that art is nearer to the heart of creation than philosophy. It is therefore capable of letting something entirely new begin. The revolution can begin with as little as an unheard-of color, an unheard-of sound.]]></description>
<dc:subject>epistemology misinformation truth public_sphere knowledge social_media decentralization temporality ritual</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:e196943676f7/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:epistemology"/>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:truth"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:knowledge"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:social_media"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:decentralization"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:temporality"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:ritual"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://www.noemamag.com/the-loss-of-public-goods-to-big-tech/">
    <title>The Loss Of Public Goods To Big Tech - NOEMA</title>
    <dc:date>2020-07-03T18:04:20+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.noemamag.com/the-loss-of-public-goods-to-big-tech/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[Much of the COVID-19 crisis response, including the disparate impact of the disease on African Americans and people who have been economically and politically abandoned, shows us the limitations, failures and potential harms of Silicon Valley promises. The consequences have been devastating. The inescapable truth is that the fragility and inequality of our social, political and economic systems have been laid bare.

We cannot automate the tough decisions, the redistributions of power and the everyday behavior it will take to make just societies. We will not compute our way out of these crises to the better future we want....

Tech companies profit off crises of many sorts. When prolonged historical racial injustice sustained by institutionalized racism, police brutality or state-sanctioned violence erupts into popular protests, tech companies and their investors rush in to capitalize....

These companies also play a key role in the decimation of shared knowledge and education as a public good. While we seek remedies based on evidence and truth that can shape policies in the collective best interest, Big Tech is implicated in displacing high-quality knowledge institutions — newsrooms, libraries, schools and universities — by destabilizing funding through tax evasion, actively eroding the public goods we need to flourish. The “Silicon Six” — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Netflix — collectively avoided paying $155.3 billion in taxes between 2010 and 2019. At the same time, more investments are being made in technologies that use faulty information collected on us — from coronavirus tracking apps to monitoring protesters to training AI models, many of which can profoundly harm, discriminate and deny us opportunities.

Calls by Black Lives Matter and others to defund the police must include dismantling and outlawing the technologies of governments and law enforcement that exacerbate the conditions of racial and economic injustice. Investments in anti-democratic technologies come at an incredible cost to the public at a time when deeper investments should be made in public health, education, public media and abolitionist approaches in the tech sector. As we struggle with multiple crises at this moment, Big Tech has exacerbated the spread of unreliable and false information and conspiracy theories, undermining trust and slowing efforts by public officials to provide greater protections for the public, especially in cities with large populations of working poor people and in communities of color. Twitter, Facebook and others also allow the spread of voter suppression disinformation, health-related conspiracy theories and racial animus through algorithmic amplification of harmful, racist and dehumanizing content in their products and services....

Over the past 30 years, Silicon Valley has skimmed the cream from our public systems, while putting the stability and longevity of public goods at stake for the rest of us. Big Tech relies on federal tax subsidies and public grants from federal agencies to fund expensive research and uses entitlements to push low-income communities out of their neighborhoods as they expand their headquarters and geographic footprints.

Big Tech uses our roads, our airports, our post offices — and rather than help prop up the system to work in the interest of all, the industry eschews responsibility and creates housing and employment crises by relying on gig-workers and contractors, effectively reducing the number of workers in the tech workforce eligible for employer-based healthcare. Big Tech fails to hire African Americans in high-paying jobs, and it actively suppresses wages for women and other people of color, especially Black women, who continue to make significantly less than men. It benefits from talent nurtured in public school systems and cherry-picks researchers favorable to its interests, without investing in the public infrastructure that enables those skills to develop....

In short, instead of being partners in building the public good, Big Tech continues to profit from its erosion. Rather than contribute to the public coffers so that we can fund the public institutions we so desperately need to support, the titans of Big Tech are trying to come to the rescue through philanthropy and expressions of personal goodwill, making private donations at a tiny fraction of their personal wealth into the charitable and non-governmental organizations of their choosing....

Dare I say it’s not acceptable to let the most vulnerable among us pay the price of our collective abandonment of care — like African Americans who are dying at faster rates than white Americans from the pandemic...

Calls to defund the police have given us the crucial and urgent impetus to reframe and reimagine the future. As we work to keep our communities alive and thriving, we must pose different questions and imagine reliable and structural remedies for the millions ensnared in systems that fail us.

We need new paradigms, not more new tech. We need fair and equitable implementations of public policy that bolster our collective good. We need to center the most vulnerable among us — the working poor and the disabled, those who live under racial and religious tyranny, the discriminated against and the oppressed. We need to house people and provide health, employment, creative arts and educational resources. We need to close the intersectional racial wealth gap.]]></description>
<dc:subject>public_interest infrastructure libraries abolution defunding_police public_sphere</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:393a0f3f7383/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_interest"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:infrastructure"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:libraries"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:abolution"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:defunding_police"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://www.udk-berlin.de/en/research/graduate-school/current-events-archive/die-balkone-life-art-pandemic-and-proximity/">
    <title>Die Balkone : Life, art, pandemic and proximity – Universität der Künste Berlin</title>
    <dc:date>2020-04-11T18:38:57+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.udk-berlin.de/en/research/graduate-school/current-events-archive/die-balkone-life-art-pandemic-and-proximity/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[We are at the very beginning of a new cycle that we cannot yet situate ourselves in. Its first palpable experiences are shifts in the relationship between inside and outside; in the distance between one day and another; between what is private, public, and political. At the same time, care, protection, and vulnerability are growing with new meanings.

Balconies serve as the public apertures of the private. They seem to be where the house ends, and yet not. In their political history, they have both been terraces of openness and hope, as well as platforms for authoritarianism and supremacy. Balconies today are the thresholds from which we can encounter the world during the confinement of the domestic: which is safe and sound for some, but not for others. They are emergency exits to take a breath of fresh air, catch a moment of sunshine or a smoke. While our freedom of mobility is on hold, they become unique sites of everyday performance or even civic mobilization. Every architecture school has its own way of designing balconies. Everyone has their own way of inhabiting them. Especially now....

Die Balkone invites members of the artistic community living in Prenzlauer Berg to activate/inhabit their windows and balconies. With zero budget, no opening, and no crowds, the project proposes an intimate stroll (within current regulations) to search for signs of life, art, and points of kinship and connection.]]></description>
<dc:subject>public_space blaconies outdoors nature public_sphere covid public_art</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:3339c08bc5ff/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_space"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:blaconies"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:outdoors"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:nature"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:covid"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_art"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://www.civicsignals.io/">
    <title>Civic Signals</title>
    <dc:date>2020-01-03T02:16:09+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.civicsignals.io/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[We are a community of designers, builders and thinkers like you. We share research, inspiration and visions of public-friendly physical and online spaces to help create a better digital environment for everyone.]]></description>
<dc:subject>public_space public_sphere</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:affbe83488aa/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_space"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="https://publicknowledge.sfmoma.org/">
    <title>Public Knowledge |</title>
    <dc:date>2017-09-30T05:45:14+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://publicknowledge.sfmoma.org/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[Public Knowledge is an expansive, multi-faceted project that aims to promote public dialogue about the cultural impact of urban and technological change and the role of public institutions in these turbulent times in San Francisco and the Bay Area. Bringing together artists, librarians, scholars, and community collaborators and partners from many backgrounds, it is spearheaded by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in partnership with the San Francisco Public Library.

The Public Knowledge initiative explores the tectonic economic, social, and cultural shifts transforming San Francisco, the factors involved in the changes taking place, and the stakes involved in surviving, resisting, adapting, and trying to shape these changes. Valuing the unique contribution that artistic thinking and practice can make to public conversations, the project will unfold over two years of artists in residence, free talks, discussions, workshops, performances, and other events in neighborhoods and libraries throughout the city. Together we will explore how contemporary art can illuminate issues of concern to our community, and create spaces for new conversations, both locally and farther afield.

In a time when providing access to public information and social engagement, once a key role of public institutions, is now being taken over by technology, the Public Knowledge project recognizes that people seem to be abandoning public institutions, and ambitiously seeks to examine the historic role of public institutions and reinvigorate their relevance today. By experimenting with new ways of forging relationships and nurturing connections, we look to act as a catalyst for participants to exchange ideas and learn from one another, and together to develop new approaches to strengthening the fabric of civic life.

The project will have a physical location at a new pop-up Public Knowledge Library, a temporary branch of the public library at SFMOMA where visitors can engage with all kinds of related materials, and an online location where anyone interested can learn more and participate.]]></description>
<dc:subject>libraries museums epistemology public_sphere discourse</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:fec2dc5cc60c/</dc:identifier>
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</item>
<item rdf:about="https://www.tni.org/en/publication/the-open-source-city-as-the-transnational-democratic-future#3">
    <title>The open source city as the transnational democratic future | Transnational Institute</title>
    <dc:date>2017-03-13T14:21:17+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.tni.org/en/publication/the-open-source-city-as-the-transnational-democratic-future#3</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[In City of fears, City of hope 7 (2003), Zygmunt Bauman talks about two important concepts related to the modern city: mixophobia (the fear used by institutions to discourage the use of the public space) and mixophilia (human and cultural mixing in cities). His main conclusion, however, is that nation-states are in decline and cities are our era’s principal political space....

The mutation of the global city into the global street is a desirable political agenda for the planet. The global street (a space both physical and semantic) and the rebel cities (as a combative remixing of the right to the city) have become narrative expressions of the global “outside”. Indeed, some of the most important social uprisings in recent times, such as the Gezi Park revolt in Turkey, the Movimento Passe Livre (MPL) in Brazil and the Gamonal protest in Burgos (Spain), have had the urban space as their initial cause. The city is also the setting for the continuation of many revolts: in Augusta Park in São Paulo, Can Batlló in Barcelona or the community-managed Embros Theatre in Athens, among many others....

These revolts have also allowed for constructing new models of participation and governance. During the Acampada Sol camp-out by Spain’s 15M in Madrid, which lasted for several weeks in May and June 2011, an online tool called Propongo 15 was developed to allow anyone to make policy proposals. Although these policy proposals did not necessarily translate into policy changes, the online tool, whose source code was later used by the government of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, revealed society’s longing for participatory democracy. ...

A society’s operating system would therefore be a series of common practices and human relationships, not just a set of online platforms. ...

to a large extent about promoting voluntary work by citizens in order justify the disappearance of the welfare state. To avoid reinforcing this, city autonomies and citizen self-management and collaboration have a crucial role to act as an incentive for mutual complementarity between public administration and citizens....

As well as using free technology, any city council that wishes to build an open source city will therefore have to recognise and protect existing citizen practices (as well as foster new ones) that reproduce the commons and strengthen that new, post-capitalist mode of “production” whether they are community centres, self-managed spaces, gardening networks or peer-to-peer file sharing networks....

The participatory repertoire of the Barcelona en Comú political confluence, which is currently governing the city of Barcelona, is seen as one of the models to be replicated. “Its radical democracy draws on a set of tools, techniques, mechanisms and structures to develop municipal policies from the bottom up. These include assemblies at various levels (neighbourhood, thematic, coordination, logistics, media, communication etc) and online platforms (for communicating, voting, working).”...

The fact that different cities are sharing the code for their digital platforms breaks with the smart city’s logic of proprietary technology and the paradigm of branded cities competing with each other. What has now been baptised as Spanish “intermunicipalism” seeks to create a network of “rebel cities for the common good” which share repositories, tools, digital platforms and methodologies.]]></description>
<dc:subject>cities protest public_sphere public_space smart_cities</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:6515d87f6e74/</dc:identifier>
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<item rdf:about="http://www.chronicle.com/article/What-Trump-s-Win-Compels/238389?cid=cr&amp;elqTrackId=5d85a9da9a0a4d689488c19b9417ec7a&amp;elq=e908ccdaabcb46f6b48a85ee168d3a79&amp;elqaid=11469&amp;elqat=1&amp;elqCampaignId=4487">
    <title>What Trump’s Win Compels Scholars to Do - The Chronicle of Higher Education</title>
    <dc:date>2016-11-14T13:14:46+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.chronicle.com/article/What-Trump-s-Win-Compels/238389?cid=cr&amp;elqTrackId=5d85a9da9a0a4d689488c19b9417ec7a&amp;elq=e908ccdaabcb46f6b48a85ee168d3a79&amp;elqaid=11469&amp;elqat=1&amp;elqCampaignId=4487</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[As a social scientist, I’m especially aware of how universities have contributed to another problem in American political culture: excessive faith in Big-Data analytics, and insufficient concern about the quality of the data we’re producing. Even those of us who merely consume that data are implicated....

In retrospect, there were flaws with both the data (its reliance on land lines, and its failure to account for those who didn’t feel comfortable acknowledging that they’d vote for Trump) and the models used to analyze them (in crucial states, turnout levels were far lower than in the recent past). And the truth is that preventing those kinds of mistakes is extremely difficult. It’s one reason many of us — even, or perhaps especially, in the social sciences — worry that the Big Data revolution may go too far, pulling resources away from other valuable forms of knowledge production, such as ethnography, history, and philosophy. ...

Of course, universities aren’t the only institutions that are pushing the Big Data revolution. It comes from engineering firms in Silicon Valley, media companies in New York City, and a variety of other industries. But universities have played a special role in legitimating this emerging form of research, and emphasizing it over other ways of knowing. Did the new data-driven polling we helped pioneer affect how the candidates ran their campaigns, shaping who and where they targeted scarce resources and time? If so, perhaps now is the time to ask whether we’ve overstated the public benefits of Big Data analysis while underestimating the risks....

There’s one other thing that universities must do better: teach students skills for learning, discerning, reasoning, and communicating in an informational environment dominated by quick hits on social media like Twitter and Facebook. Like it or not, social media is at the center of the new public sphere. This election leaves no doubt that candidates, campaigns, and their surrogates can make great use of it: planting memes, spreading rumors, building communities. Professors know how to help students work through difficult ideas in books and articles. But except for some of us in the learning sciences, few of us have thought much about how to help students develop critical-thinking skills for the media that they use most.
I don’t blame academics for neglecting this kind of pedagogy, and we did not create this civic problem. But professors — particularly humanists and social scientists — are well positioned to help students navigate the new informational environment. We should rise to the challenge.]]></description>
<dc:subject>liberal_arts higher_education pedagogy public_sphere</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:9816e6e83d3e/</dc:identifier>
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</item>
<item rdf:about="http://www.chronicle.com/article/How-Did-Trump-Get-Elected-/238385?cid=cr&amp;elqTrackId=de1ebe5c21084d01a3e2af4e80a65d2d&amp;elq=e908ccdaabcb46f6b48a85ee168d3a79&amp;elqaid=11469&amp;elqat=1&amp;elqCampaignId=4487">
    <title>How Did Trump Get Elected? Take a Look in the Mirror - The Chronicle of Higher Education</title>
    <dc:date>2016-11-14T13:12:17+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.chronicle.com/article/How-Did-Trump-Get-Elected-/238385?cid=cr&amp;elqTrackId=de1ebe5c21084d01a3e2af4e80a65d2d&amp;elq=e908ccdaabcb46f6b48a85ee168d3a79&amp;elqaid=11469&amp;elqat=1&amp;elqCampaignId=4487</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[What responsibility do members of the academy bear for the shocking devolution of American politics that has just occurred? Quite a bit, I’d say.

For one, the university’s historical role in purveying "truth" has diminished qualitatively. That it has become obligatory to put this term in quotation marks is a good indication of how far we have fallen. Whereas the pursuit of truth may retain its value at those bastions of educational privilege where a liberal education has remained meaningful, elsewhere the ideals of humanistic study have been essentially left for dead. In this respect, we have met the enemy and he is "us."

The triumph of identity politics has also played a deleterious role. Amid the vogue of multiculturalism, the humanities have exempted strong claims to group identity — so-called "subject positions" that are embraced, sometimes inflexibly, by ethnic and cultural groups — from scrutiny, thereby sparing them from the type of withering interrogations that, since the Renaissance, have defined the culture of critical discourse.

Abetting these trends, university presidents have readily jettisoned a commitment to higher cultural and intellectual goals. In their rush to demonstrate the payoff of a four-year degree, they have shamelessly and enthusiastically hopped on the "relevance" and "bottom line" bandwagons.
Historically, one of the central missions of higher education, in addition to preparing students for the rigors of the job market, has been to nurture the values of active citizenship — the encouragement and cultivation of character traits that are epitomized by the idea of "autonomy." Brusquely put, this means producing individuals who are capable of making thoughtful and mature political judgments as well as intelligent life decisions.

This approach was exemplified by the philosopher John Dewey’s conviction that the key to developing virtues conducive to democratic citizenship lay with the anti-authoritarian, dialogic approach of the Socratic method. Thus Dewey held that emancipatory pedagogy required the abandonment of mind-numbing, rote instruction in favor of honing the skills of critical thinking. Dewey was convinced that the experience of participatory learning was an apprenticeship for the practice of democratic citizenship. To the nation’s detriment, the academy has turned its back on Dewey’s insight.]]></description>
<dc:subject>liberal_arts public_sphere higher_education totalitarianism</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:4fdd278eb0cc/</dc:identifier>
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</item>
<item rdf:about="http://davidlankes.org/?p=9047">
    <title>The Knowledge School and an Election Mandate | R. David Lankes</title>
    <dc:date>2016-11-09T23:33:42+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://davidlankes.org/?p=9047</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[All of these works will be useful and will help us to better understand a new reality where polls and predictive models failed spectacularly. However, while we may do some of this kind of work, our role as a knowledge school is different. Our role is not simply to document the campaign. Our role is not simply to analyze the data generated by the candidates. Our role is to act.

Democracy is not about voting. Voting is a periodic decision: democracy is sustained conversation, oversight, and advocacy. The work of a citizen did not end yesterday; it began. For those who chose or opposed a candidate, there is now the vital work of holding those chosen to account. An election doesn’t change a constitution. An election doesn’t change demographics.

The role of a knowledge school, the role of you and me, is to reinforce the values and principles we hold dear and support the communities that make up our nation and the world. We cannot simply explore the racial makeup of the electorate without providing opportunity for all races. Our values of diversity in decision making and ensuring equity of opportunity for all religions, classes, and ideology must be put into action, not theses.

If this election has shown us anything it is not that our communities are facing too little information, it is that information alone is insufficient for informed action. The problems our communities face is not one of access to resources, but access to the right resources provided to the ready learner. The problems are about creating a culture of literacy, open civic conversation, and knowledge. We must not mistake describing people’s opinions with facilitating learning....

Tomorrow we have a new administration that needs oversight and a direct link to the best scholarship we can provide. We have a country that is increasing living in echo chambers built in walls of selective data that needs action to push them to greater insight. Tomorrow, in essence, needs us: scholars, librarians, information professionals, staff, faculty, alumni, and students focused on making a better world.]]></description>
<dc:subject>libraries information democracy access discourse public_sphere data epistemology</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:1519887ae1fe/</dc:identifier>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:democracy"/>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:data"/>
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<item rdf:about="https://chrisbourg.wordpress.com/2016/10/28/educause-2016-libraries-and-future-of-higher-education/">
    <title>Educause 2016: Libraries and future of higher education | Feral Librarian</title>
    <dc:date>2016-10-29T07:07:28+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://chrisbourg.wordpress.com/2016/10/28/educause-2016-libraries-and-future-of-higher-education/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[As fewer people “go to the library” there has been a growing genre of literature I’ll call the “how to save libraries” genre.

Trends like declining circulation of print books and, in some cases, declining foot traffic in physical library buildings, has led to all kinds of strategies for “saving libraries”.

For academic libraries, that has usually been about turning libraries into information commons, always with coffee shops inside; and/or pumping up the role of librarians in teaching study skills, info-seeking skills and otherwise tying the work of the library folks into student success.

These are all good things, and make for good talks and articles, but my talk today will not be part of that genre. This will not be a “save the libraries” talk.

(this talk by David Lankes, where he references a great talk by Char Booth ,is a much more nuanced take on this than my soundbite intro here)

Let me go ahead and give away the punch line now: I don’t think we need to save libraries, but I do think we might need libraries to save us....

This is where libraries come in.

Libraries and librarians can and do play a crucial role in creating a more open, connected, and equitable future for higher education (and for our communities) through our support and facilitation of open access to scholarship and through our role in providing inclusive spaces that facilitate community building and formal and informal learning.

Let me talk first about openness....

This is one of the key themes in the preliminary report on the future of libraries just released by MIT on Monday:

For the MIT Libraries, the better world we seek is one in which there is abundant, equitable, meaningful access to knowledge and to the products of the full life cycle of research.

And lo and behold, it is libraries and librarians who are implementing open access policies in our research organizations and who are doing the heavy lifting to make journal articles (and some other forms of scholarship, like data and in some cases books and textbooks) openly available in meaningful, organized ways through institutional repositories and through educating authors on their rights and options.

Right now we are doing that in a hybrid environment, where much of the literature libraries provide to our communities is still not openly available; we provide it to “authorized users” only based on the contracts we sign with publishers – many of whom are for-profit entities who dabble in open access publishing, but who at the end of the day are still driven by a profit motive not an educational or social good motive.

Having research locked away behind corporate paywalls and/or behind our institutional authentication systems means that access to information is not only not free; but is fragmented and cumbersome.

The current landscape of scholarly literature consists of multiple silos of information, accessed through library websites, journal sites, aggregators sites, google and google scholar, social media sites, you name it....

Libraries are special places on campus and the Libraries and their staff occupy an essential role in the intellectual and social life of our college and university communities, perhaps especially for students.

The Libraries are a place of research and learning, and library staff are subject-matter and methodological experts who are committed to supporting student success.

One important characteristic of library staff that distinguishes them from faculty is the lack of any authoritative or evaluative role over students. This makes the Libraries places where students might be especially free and comfortable asking questions, seeking help, experimenting with nascent ideas and thoughts, and making mistakes.

Combine that with the fact that Libraries are places where intellectual freedom and privacy are deeply valued and fiercely protected, and it is quite possible that libraries will be the places our students and other community members might feel the most comfortable talking about difficult topics. Perhaps we could start to bridge some of the racial and other divides on our own campuses in and through the libraries; through formal and informal learning and dialogue in our spaces and through exposing students to an inclusive range of credible sources of information and knowledge and research.]]></description>
<dc:subject>libraries social_justice open_access discourse public_sphere</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:fff93b739c70/</dc:identifier>
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</item>
<item rdf:about="https://jussiparikka.net/2016/08/04/ear-witnesses-of-a-coup-night/">
    <title>Earwitnesses of a Coup Night | Machinology</title>
    <dc:date>2016-08-11T03:40:37+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://jussiparikka.net/2016/08/04/ear-witnesses-of-a-coup-night/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[The soundscape of the coup was itself a spectacle catered to many senses: the helicopters hovering around the city; the different calibre gunfire that ranged from heavy fire from helicopters to individual pistol shots; individual explosions; car horns; sirens, and the roaring F-16 that descended at times so low so that its sonic boom broke windows of flats. Such sonic booms have their own grim history as part of the 21st century sonic warfare as cultural theorist Steve Goodman analysed the relation of modern technologies, war and aesthetics. As has been reported for years, for example Israeli military has used sonic noise of military jets in Palestine as a shock technique: “Palestinians liken the sound to an earthquake or huge bomb. They describe the effect as being hit by a wall of air that is painful on the ears, sometimes causing nosebleeds and ‘leaving you shaking inside’.”

In the midst of sonic booms,  a different layer of sound was felt through the city: the mosques starting their extraordinary call to prayer and calls to gather on the streets.... the chain of media triggers ranged from the corporate digital videotelephony to television broadcasting to the infrastructures of the mosques to people on the streets tweeting, filming, messaging and posting on social media. All of this formed a sort of a feedback-looped sphere of information and speculation, of action and messaging, of rumours and witnessing. ...

The mosques started to amplify the political leadership’s social media call by their own acoustic means.... Turkish artist and technologist Burak Arikan had already in his earlier work mapped the urban infrastructure of Istanbul in terms of its mosques, malls and national monuments....

During the coup weekend, it was the network of the mosques and their minarets that became suddenly very visible – or actually, very audible. While the regular praying times have become such an aural infrastructure of the city that one does not necessarily consciously notice it, the extraordinary calls from imams reminded how dense this social, architectural fabric actually is. The thousands of Istanbul mosques became itself an explicit “sonic social network” where the average estimated reach (300 meters) of sound  from the minarets is too important of a detail to neglect when one wants to understand architecture as solidifying social networks in contemporary Turkey. In the context of mid-July it was one crucial relay of communication between the private sphere in homes, the streets and the online platforms contributing to the mobilization of the masses.]]></description>
<dc:subject>acoustics sound_space protest public_sphere media_city islam</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:13f0be5f9cdb/</dc:identifier>
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</item>
<item rdf:about="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/thinking-public-private-intellectuals-time-public/">
    <title>Thinking, Public and Private: Intellectuals in the Time of the Public</title>
    <dc:date>2016-07-16T19:52:07+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/thinking-public-private-intellectuals-time-public/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[THE TERM “PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL” is a fount of confusion. We admire such persons for speaking the truth about the corruptions of politics, for explaining climate change to a world that would prefer a more convenient truth, or for their unblinking acknowledgment of the structural racism of our society. At other times, we mock them for dumbing down the ideas they have the privilege to steward, and suspect them of a venal desire for influence and power, or, worse, we suspect that beneath such desires lies a lack of intellectual curiosity and seriousness. The word “public,” when conjoined with “intellectual,” sometimes seems to invite an intellectually lazy enthusiasm or an equally lazy criticism....

Why, for example, has the notion of publicness itself become such a high value for some, practically synonymous with benevolence, as if to attach “public” to the name of a discipline grants it a special dignity? Getting un-confused about the term “public intellectual” does not require jettisoning the notion of public engagement altogether, but rather turning these keywords — “intellectual,” “public” — over and over, depriving them of the sense of obvious meaning produced by too-frequent use....

There is much to like about this effort to keep the democratic impulse within the public intellectual ideal from giving way to something worse: what Greif calls “the pseudo-public culture of insipid media and dumbed-down ‘big ideas.’” This is the world of Austin’s SXSW or Davos, the world of the TED talk, a means-ends world characterized by folk empiricism, in which ideas can only be recognized as valuable when they are pitched as “Big Ideas” “Worth Spreading"....

What may be missing in this age of public intellectualism is respect for the unpredictable half-lives of ideas themselves, and for the fact that public life could be enriched by an appreciation of ideas on their own terms....

One thing seems clear: whether in late 19th-century France or the late 20th-century United States, the question of what scholars, writers, scientists, artists, and other intellectuals contribute to public political life has stayed with us. During the Dreyfus Affair the anti-Dreyfusard Catholic scholar and writer Ferdinand Brunetière asked what gave a “professor of Tibetan” the right to instruct his fellow citizens about politics. Brunetière’s charge reflects an anxiety many present-day intellectuals still feel keenly: what do academics have to do with the world beyond their studies? Why should such figures enjoy any special legitimacy in political or cultural discourse?

Answers to this question abound, and they range from the rather old-fashioned idea that scholars of the humanities acquire something called “wisdom” to the idea that something called the “public sphere” runs on reasoned argument. Short of such idealistic claims, there are more pragmatic reasons to want intelligent, educated people to write for broad and non-academic publics. To name only one, critics — of film, food, poetry — possess specialized expertise and help us to articulate our own responses to the world in ways that the exchange of opinion between friends or strangers, rarely can. In the words of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, critics show the world its “means of comportment.”...

An attachment to “intellectuals” or “public intellectuals” can turn into a tendency to treat politics as the metric by which intellectual lives are to be judged. And it has become very popular to approach the work of intellectuals from the standpoint of their social role. So popular, in fact, that this approach has obscured another way of seeing things: to ask not how intellectuals affect their publics but how the presumption of publicness has affected the life of the mind. How has the problem of audience touched how we understand our tasks as scholars and writers? How has it affected the value we place on private, individual contemplation? We need not look at the current baleful tendency to judge scholarship by metrics of influence, such as the citation-counting of the British Research Excellence Framework (REF), or the TED-ish notion that impact is all, to see that a certain instrumentalism was always present in the idea of the intellectual, a certain dependency on an idea of audience as tribunal....

Arendt often used the term “intellectual” with scorn. She never accepted the idea that specialized education provided political wisdom, nor was she invested in the fantasy that the public would be won over by superior arguments or share some professional thinkers’ disinterested love of truth. In her 1958 book The Human Condition, Arendt rejected the idea that politics would be improved by the presence of expert opinions.... later, in her 1963 study On Revolution, Arendt once again characterized “intellectuals” as individuals who instrumentalized education; they found nothing in their mental lives, in other words, to transport them beyond the means-ends world whose pointlessness Wordsworth once described with the line “getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” ...Her dual attention to politics and to philosophy never led her to dissolve one into the other, or to miss the contradictions between them. Her works offer a prototype for such contemporary writers as Greif, who seek a pedagogical model of the public writer, someone who demands that their readers improve themselves rather than imagining that her public requires a paint-by-numbers version of philosophy and social thought.... As professional thinkers come to understand “publicness” more and more as the permanent condition of our work, then, we might also come to better appreciate the specific ways in which politics and scholarship intersect, and the ways they remain fundamentally separate. This would mean recovering the disquiet within the term “public intellectual,” and treating that disquiet as an invitation to rethink the relationship between thought and action.]]></description>
<dc:subject>public_sphere public_intellectualism populism discourse</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:b009c62f6777/</dc:identifier>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_intellectualism"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:populism"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:discourse"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://www.architectural-review.com/10008320.article">
    <title>‘The town as a place of social intercourse has been taken for granted throughout the whole of civilisation’</title>
    <dc:date>2016-07-16T19:21:43+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.architectural-review.com/10008320.article</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[The idea of the town as a place of assembly, of social intercourse, of meeting, was taken for granted throughout the whole of human civilization up to the twentieth century. You might assemble in the Forum at Pompeii 100 yds. by 50 or round the market cross, 10 yds. by 5, but you assembled; it was a ritual proper to man, both a rite and a right. Nor in the general way did you have to explain whether your motives were proper or profane. Men are gregarious and expect to meet. In all ages but ours, that is. Today, partly from hurry, partly from worry, partly from pressure of motor traffic, we are forgetting to meet, and the various kinds of policemen, in and out of uniform who direct our affairs, are busy making it impossible for us to meet, by making little gardens of such of our open spaces as are not already roundabouts, railing them round, ornamenting them into islands of rustic absurdity and then, if possible, locking them up....

Because the motor car demands first, a pedestrian-free permanent way; second, a smooth surface; third, vast open acreage for parking lots. The first neutralizes the space for use, the second destroys the character of the space by introducing a neutral floor, the third eats up all unfenced urban openings for car-storage. There is a fourth danger which has nothing to do with traffic and that is the deliberate attempt by what one might term the ‘eternal prefect’ mentality to prevent natural assembly.

At its worst this outlook regards assembly as synonymous with idleness (hanging about at street corners) but often it springs from no more than a distaste to have the steps of the cross worn out by loungers. Actually most steps are all the better for loungers, ‘loungers’ being the expression of distaste northern puritans use for anyone who has the time to sit or stand around enjoying life.]]></description>
<dc:subject>urban_form urban_planning public_sphere transportation</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:f5d429fb5a8c/</dc:identifier>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:urban_planning"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:transportation"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i218/s15/Info218-Syllabus-Spring-2015.html">
    <title>Concepts of Information: Duguid + Nunberg — Syllabus — Spring 2015</title>
    <dc:date>2016-04-15T12:05:30+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i218/s15/Info218-Syllabus-Spring-2015.html</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[technology - info theory - shannon/weaver - knowledge - platforms - cybernetics - info overload - data -classification - economics of info - politics + info - objectivity - truth - education - public sphere - intellectual_property - cognitive science - ]]></description>
<dc:subject>syllabus teaching archives information data knowledge public_sphere intellectual_property</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:520e7278d018/</dc:identifier>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:teaching"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:archives"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:information"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:data"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:knowledge"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:intellectual_property"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://chronicle.com/article/Empire-of-Letters/234714?cid=cr">
    <title>Empire of Letters (on LARB) | The Chronicle Review</title>
    <dc:date>2016-01-04T17:38:13+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://chronicle.com/article/Empire-of-Letters/234714?cid=cr</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[Despite the shaky status of humane letters in the era of STEM, the past decade has seen a small surge of new magazines. Along with LARB, they include The New Inquiry, Jacobin, and Public Books, as well as the revived The Baffler, and, a little earlier, n+1, which evokes the spirit of highbrow little magazines like Partisan Review.
Digital evangelists would probably credit the magic of new technology, but actually most of the journals are late to the online game, and fairly conventional in their presentation. Moreover, several of them still feature print editions. Rather, what’s distinctive about them is that they represent a rising generation, in editors as well as contributors and readers, and in sensibility. n+1, for instance, was founded by a group of Harvard University graduates born in the late 1970s, and Jacobin was founded by a 21-year-old undergraduate at George Washington University. They tend to carry more lively writing than the previous cohort of journals, which were more ensconced in their specialties and directed to an academic audience.]]></description>
<dc:subject>public_sphere criticism publications</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:30d04ff81996/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:criticism"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:publications"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://hyperallergic.com/252203/a-fragmented-city-characterized-by-fences-doors-and-distance/">
    <title>A Fragmented City Characterized by Fences, Doors, and Distance</title>
    <dc:date>2015-11-29T02:38:56+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://hyperallergic.com/252203/a-fragmented-city-characterized-by-fences-doors-and-distance/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[Open To The Public, now showing at VACANCY, presents works that recreate some of the city’s most familiar physical features related to purposes of security, surveillance, and mobility. While Chris Burden’s assemblage of street lights at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art may bring a kind of whimsy to Los Angeles urbanism, the works here, by artists Brody Albert and Kaeleen Wescoat-O’Neill, create the opposite effect — a literal-mindedness that answers the question of how to represent the city by simulating some of its smallest, most banal yet salient, features....

Open To The Public disturbs the allowances of public and private space by transposing the security features of the city into the gallery. The artworks proscribe access to the space by literally functioning as physical barrier, and expand access by making some parts visible from the road or sidewalk. In this way, the show is as disorienting and easy to miss as the city experienced from the inside of a moving car.]]></description>
<dc:subject>art transportation public_sphere surveillance mapping Los_Angeles</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:7deb857e3e8a/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:art"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:transportation"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:surveillance"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:mapping"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:Los_Angeles"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/book-selling-mutanabbi-street-texts-vital-sidewalks">
    <title>Book-selling on Mutanabbi Street: texts from vital sidewalks | Al Akhbar English</title>
    <dc:date>2014-12-08T09:33:49+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/book-selling-mutanabbi-street-texts-vital-sidewalks</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[Today, the statue of Saddam Hussein has been destroyed, and the street has become free. Any library or street-vendor can buy any books he wants and display them before the people.

There are two types of book displays: Some offer books at a fixed liquidation price (1,000-2,000 dinars), while others provide new publications at varying prices. However, the vendors differ: While some sell books just to make a living, others are educated and well-read, and their presence in Mutanabbi Street has helped widen their knowledge.

I met Ahmed Abadi, a vendor stationed at the left side of the street. I checked out the books he has on display. A young man asked him about the novel, “Baghdad Mail” by Jose Miguel Paras. He apologized because the book is unavailable. Abadi said he was familiar with the novel, which tells the story of a bunch of papers that were left behind in a drawer at a newspaper editor’s office in Chile. He adds that they are “letters from Baghdad,” and talks about the coup staged by [Augusto] Pinochet against [Salvador] Allende.

Abadi believes that the street-vending phenomenon became popular after the 1991 Gulf War, driven forward by intellectuals who started to sell their books, or engage in the buying and selling of books in the streets and providing banned ones.

“Street-vending underwent two stages after April 2003. First, an initial heightened interest by the people and intellectuals stemming from a desire to know the truth and different opinions, followed by a decline of interest due to instability, such as the economic situation, popular disappointment over what’s happening in the country, and the spread of social media,” he opined...

“The identity of the street has also changed as you can see, from a street that sells books to a weekly festival full of ideas, trends, and commodities, like Souk Okaz where contests used to be held between writers, politicians, and institutions,” he mused.

]]></description>
<dc:subject>media_city books print reading public_sphere</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:0dbd4ea42d37/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:media_city"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:books"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:print"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:reading"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/vernacular-criticism/">
    <title>Vernacular Criticism | The New Inquiry</title>
    <dc:date>2014-07-25T18:28:52+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/vernacular-criticism/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[many Yelp reviews confront the engineered homogeneity of the museum experience, the standardized conditions that Brian O’Doherty, an artist and critic, wrote about in Inside the White Cube. In these essays, written in the 1970s, O’Doherty describes the origins of ubiquitous gallery architecture and offers a critique of the white cube’s transformation of the viewer into a phantom, a spectral organ of cognition designed for the bodiless appreciation of art....

Yelp does a lot of things, including a number things that make people hate it. But one thing it does is provide a platform for vernacular art criticism, a different kind of writing about art and the public spaces where it is seen. Vernacular criticism can reject the guidelines set by cultivated artistic tastes, or it can guilelessly speak in ignorance of them, or in its naive fascination with them can inadvertently expose their falseness. Vernacular criticism is an expression of taste that has not been fully calibrated to the tastes cultivated in and by museums. Vernacular criticism inscribes bodies in public spaces that would otherwise erase them....

I’ve never studied art history, which from a distance looks like a bleakly stuffy field, concerned with questions of influence and provenance that stake out an autonomous purity for art and its mediums, that disengages them from social or cultural history. Criticism, as opposed to history, appeals to me as a practice of inscribing art in life....

The art critic doesn’t change the art world’s systems of power; he simply gives them publicity by reminding readers that they exist. So it is with the yelper who accumulates language around a storefront or a brand....

Their opinion would probably be endorsed by Pierre Bourdieu, who in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste uses sociological data to argue that the theory of aesthetic judgment proposed by Kant in the 18th century as a description of a universal human condition is, in fact, particular to the class interests of the bourgeoisie. Like my fellow members of the Yelp Elite, Bourdieu chose not to grant art special status, to recognize its distinction from other pursuits. “The dispositions which govern ­choices between the goods of legitimate culture cannot be fully understood … unless ‘culture,’ in the restricted, normative sense of ordinary usage, is reinserted into ‘culture’ in the broad, anthropological sense, and the elaborated taste for the most refined objects is brought back into relation with the elementary taste for the flavors of food.” Taste is an embodied, sensory experience—one that originates in the gut and touches the world with the tongue. But it is also subject to a number of social abstractions that manage it, rationalize it, and build what Bourdieu calls a “magical barrier,” distinguishing “legitimate culture” through the skilled labor of identification and decoding, distinctions reproduced in education and cultivated over time.

The museum lives behind such a magical barrier. The power structures of Yelp—the hierarchy of service provider and users, algorithms of usefulness, advertising—have nothing to do with the museum’s power, and so Yelp can smash its magical barrier. Yelp puts museums into pages labeled with their names and addresses where anything can be said about them, the same as any other business....

There has been a lot of speculation about whether or not social media can measure artistic merit—or any merit—through likes, favorites, reblogs, retweets and so on. But the conversation tends to be limited to the potential of these metrics to measure quality, without acknowledging that such a process of measuring constitutes an attempt to merely “democratize” the meritocracy. This totally misses the potential of social media to account for the plurality of tastes found in the world. And so the counting of social-media attention is always ­unsatisfying—these metrics give a unified count of everything whose sums mean nothing.

Yelp—as well as Amazon and other review sites—shoehorn taste into metered ratings, but they also demand a first-person expression of taste. They ask the user to be a critic without demanding the past labor of cultivation or the other social abstractions imposed by the public sphere....

Yelp is not the answer to criticism’s problems. On its own it can’t transform criticism, or museums, for the better. The reviews of museums there may eschew the academic jargon of art writing and bourgeois biases of taste, but they tend to replace them with the clichés of marketing and advertising—the register of a commercialized public sphere—found in Yelp reviews of restaurants, strip clubs, or salons.

And yet Yelp could help reset the terms of art criticism, as an environment where the judgment of one among others not obligated by any judgment except their own is newly fresh, and where this judgment is honestly subjective and contingent, as tasted by unobligated bodies.]]></description>
<dc:subject>artists_books public_sphere vernacular taste</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:f2464c1219f6/</dc:identifier>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:taste"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://scholar.harvard.edu/vanvalkenburgh/classes/archaeological-approaches-architecture">
    <title>Archaeological Approaches to Architecture | Parker VanValkenburgh</title>
    <dc:date>2013-02-14T17:08:13+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://scholar.harvard.edu/vanvalkenburgh/classes/archaeological-approaches-architecture</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[Week 5 - Poetics, Pragmatics, and Performance: The Built Environment as Text and Stage

Duncan, James. 1991. The City as Text: The Politics of Landscape Interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. [Selections]

Keane, Webb. 2003. “Semiotics and the Social Analysis of Material Things.” Language and Communication 23: 409-425.

Whyte, William. 2006. “How Do Buildings Mean? Some Issues of Interpretation in the History of Architecture,” History and Theory 45: 153-177.

Hodder, Ian. 1994. “Architecture and Meaning: The Example of Nelithic Houses and Tombs,” in Parker Pearson and Richards, Op cit.

Houston, Stephen. 1998. “Finding Function and Meaning in Classic Maya Architecture,” in Houston, Stephen, ed., Function and Meaning in Classic Maya Architecture. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collections. Pp. 519-538.

Boteler Mock, Shirley. 1998. “Prelude,” in Boteler Mock, Shirley, ed., The Sowing and the Dawning: Termination, Dedication, and Transformation in the Archaeological and Ethnograhpic Record of Mesoamerica.” Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Pp.

Inomata, Takeshi and Lawrence S. Coben. 2006 “Overture: An Invitation to Archaeological Theatre,” in Inomata and Coben, eds, Op cit.

Roth, Leland. 2007. “’Delight:’ Seeing Architecture,” in Roth, Op Cit.]]></description>
<dc:subject>media_architecture text public_sphere theater archaeology urban_form</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:372e47f6cfb1/</dc:identifier>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:text"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:theater"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:archaeology"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:urban_form"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/13/01/when-newspapers-were-new-or-how-londoners-got-word-of-the-plague/272638/">
    <title>When Newspapers Were New, or, How Londoners Got Word of the Plague - Alexis C. Madrigal - The Atlantic</title>
    <dc:date>2013-01-30T17:26:47+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/13/01/when-newspapers-were-new-or-how-londoners-got-word-of-the-plague/272638/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[Defoe would have been a mean blogger. He rose to national prominence as a journalist in the burgeoning print media scene of early 18th-century England. In part, he was so successful because he could crank out the copy. A biographer, Penn's John Richetti, called him a "veritable writing machine," and went on to say, "for sheer fluency and day-to-day pertinence and insight, there is nothing else in English political writing then or since quite like this extended and unflagging performance."

Defoe: "    We had no such thing as printed newspapers in those days to spread rumours and reports of things, and to improve them by the invention of men, as I have lived to see practised since. But such things as these were gathered from the letters of merchants and others who corresponded abroad, and from them was handed about by word of mouth only; so that things did not spread instantly over the whole nation, as they do now." He was a creator of (the new) print journalism, and yet he does not know what to say about its impact on his world. I mean, who has not felt deep ambivalence about digital media while clicking away on Facebook or Twitter or Google News or TheAtlantic.com? It could have stopped there. In fact, that was my plan for this post. Making fun of Vine, Ms. Vine User? Meet your ancestor, Daniel Defoe, patron saint of those who equivocate over their vocation. 

But, this one phrase stuck in my head: "to spread rumours and reports of things, and to improve them by the invention of men." It is brilliant. Positive words (improve, invention) end up attached to "rumours and reports," and become deeply ambivalent. Improved rumors, invented reports, invented rumors, improved reports. (At least one of these things is not so bad.) The newspapers, then, pervert ... not the simple facts, but "rumours and reports of things," the stuff brought by merchants and letter-receivers, printed by pamphleteers, dreamed up in coffeeshops, posted in Bills of Mortality, given as decree by governments, divined in comet-visitations, or seen with one's own eyes. The newspapers, it would appear, perverted the melange that was late 17th-century news before the proliferation and formalization of newspapers...

And yet, the deliberate secrecy of the government and the asymmetry of access to information (i.e. the rich hoarding intelligence) is portrayed as an evil. Mismanagement of information in the word-of-mouth networks carrying tidings led to (more) people dying. Wannabe prophets and medical quacks ruled because people lacked the information to discriminate reality from whatever else. In that way, papers that helped news "spread instantly over the whole nation," might be ultimately redeemed...

I found a wonderful and nuanced account of a media system in a state of change with Defoe acting as both mover and shaken. He was not alone. Her book situates him among several other literary authors -- John Bunyan, Aphra Behn, and Jonathan Swift -- who dealt with the rise of a new kind of information age while they were writing. Ellison shows how they demonstrated strategies for dealing with this "information overload," a state that existed despite the word's slow entrance into broader usage...

Rather than a categorical pro- or anti-printing technology stance, these writers figured out ways to work with the new things the technology allowed and society attempted. They gave literate citizens different reading, organizational, and genre strategies. 

"People didn't respond solely enthusiastically about the technology. They did not respond only with unbridled enthusiasm or only with horror, saying, 'We're going too fast, we're going too fast,' Ellison told me. "What you see the literary authors doing is already grappling with the consequences and strategies for coping with this perception of being overwhelmed."...

His book is filled with notices of the dead in the city, the Bills of Mortality, which serve to chart the rise of the disease outbreak. But he takes this quantification and inflects it with the reality of the human production of statistics... Many times throughout the book, Defoe's narrator watches a crowd try to make sense of something, say the appearance of a comet, or an apparition, and he keeps a critical distance, you might say... Defoe shows how not to be "imposed upon" by the information that exists all around him in the city of London. That information emanates from many sources: the texts released by governments, the rumors of the people, or the possible signs in the environment itself. Defoe's narrator reads all these kinds of information in the same way, with healthy skepticism, and an unwillingness to be like the crowd, "terrified by the force of their own imagination." Indeed, Ellison notes that other Defoe scholars had shown "that oral messages, printed texts, and manuscripts cannot be thought of simply as separate media." These communications were promiscuous and tended to cross boundaries...

The one thing about Defoe's approach to information that will probably strike more secular, modern ears as strange is his commitment to seeing the signs of God's will in the information around him...

And this medium we're all co-creating to "spread rumours and reports of things," this grab-bag of tools we call the Internet? Let us not forget the double meaning Defoe gives to the words "improve" and "invention." These are not simple things. They have costs, which are different, but not categorically distinct from, the solutions that came before them. As we endeavor to build something new and better, I recommend the dose of humility for our times that Ellison delivers as the first line of her book, "Every age has been an information age."

]]></description>
<dc:subject>public_sphere newspapers rumor oral_culture information_overload communication_networks</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:e8d79ea90baa/</dc:identifier>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:newspapers"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:rumor"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:oral_culture"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:information_overload"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:communication_networks"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://places.designobserver.com/feature/public-and-commons/37647/">
    <title>Public and Common(s): Places: Design Observer</title>
    <dc:date>2013-01-24T22:06:22+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://places.designobserver.com/feature/public-and-commons/37647/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[On the one hand we have the set of concepts assembled around the term “public,” as in public realm, public sphere, public space, public sector, and “the public” itself. On the other we have the set of concepts associated with the term “common”: the common(s), common sense, and common wealth... Circulating between these two sets of terms is the category of the “social,” as in socialism, but also as used by the philosopher Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition (1958), to differentiate the modern managerial sphere, including both state- and market-based social or behavioral management, from the classical res publica... For Arendt, the polis constitutes a “space of appearance,” in which being-in-public, or “publicity,” is effectively synonymous with politics. More than simply a public square or forum, the space of appearance is potentially ubiquitous... Jürgen Habermas, in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), associates in passing Arendt’s “rise of the social” with the emergence of what he calls the bourgeois public sphere (Öffentlichkeit)... Habermas’s public is a bourgeois “reading public” which, in the late 18th century, frequented libraries, gathered in cafés to discuss matters of state, and published their opinions in daily broadsheets and in monthly political journals...

Nancy Fraser has offered the category of “subaltern counterpublics” in an effort to throw off balance Habermas’s implicitly male, white, moneyed, or otherwise hegemonic public sphere; by this Fraser means those groups or categories of citizens and noncitizens that are structurally excluded, usually by some combination of gender, race, and class, from the political commerce of bourgeois capitalism. Fraser’s “subaltern counterpublics” describes a whole host of potentially incommensurable public spheres, or “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs.”...

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri...argue that during the course of the 20th century, the world order based on the sovereignty of nation-states has been gradually and unevenly replaced by what they call “imperial sovereignty,” or Empire, a transnational, biopolitical capitalism coursing fluidly through both affective and instrumental channels. For Hardt and Negri, then, the categories of “public” and “private,” linked historically with state socialism or social democracy on the one hand, and liberal republicanism on the other, simply connote two different means to the same end: the reproduction of capital...

Hardt and Negri therefore encourage us to look “beyond public and private” for philosophical concepts and political practices capable of challenging and transforming the “republic of property” that underlies both categories. Most frequently they find models in the insurgent, bottom-up politics of the counter- or alter-globalization movements that proliferated in the 1990s, or in the autonomous democracy practiced by groups such as the Mexican Zapatistas. They see the heterogeneous, sometimes fractious “multitude” that comes together in these and countless other, less visible movements as the contrary to the homogenized modern masses or an abstract, universal “public.” But this multitude does not merely replace or multiply these earlier versions. Instead, for Hardt and Negri, the multitude constitutes a novel historical subject that draws its energies from the constant production of common goods and, especially, common knowledge and services, provoked by resistance to capitalism but not wholly determined by it.

What are these goods and services? Hardt and Negri place a great deal of emphasis on the productivity of “immaterial labor,” the type of labor characteristic of what is sometimes called the service sector. They have therefore been criticized for deemphasizing or ignoring manual labor and the working class. In response to this they argue that under these new conditions it is not a matter of one class or sector replacing another, but of one logic — applying to all classes and sectors — replacing, or at least displacing, another. Immaterial labor is based above all on communication, and it is this they seek to release in radically transformative, revolutionary directions...

What is less clear, however, is the medium by which communication becomes common. Unlike many theorists of the communicative public sphere, Hardt and Negri have relatively little to say about the specific forms of mediation by which collective subjectivities are formed. By this I mean not only technological mediation — as in the properties of those communications systems by which a multitude comes into its heterogeneous being-in-common — but also other mediating instruments, like social structures (the family, the nation) or institutions (schools, hospitals, housing, workplaces, prisons, communications networks)...

...I want to ask whether the exhausted category of the public, and with it the ruined infrastructures of the state — including Sputnik’s descendants — might be reappropriated as media, or as fragments of a media system, in which life-in-common can take place. At a practical and political as well as a philosophical level, this reappropriation entails modulating the directness of direct or participatory democracy with a media theory of communications. Hardt and Negri suggest as much when they cite recent scholarship on radically democratic media practices... But nowhere do they work through the structural, rather than circumstantial, particulars of the very mediating infrastructures by which they propose to “save” capitalism from itself while simultaneously preparing the ground for its multitudinous alternative...

referring to the metropolis as the “inorganic body of the multitude,” Hardt and Negri suggestively argue that “the metropolis is to the multitude what the factory was to the industrial city,” in three ways. [12] First, the contemporary city is “the space of the common,” a privileged site in which an “artificial common” of “languages, images, knowledges, affects, codes, habits, and practices” is produced. Second, the city is (and long has been) a site of aleatory and “joyful” encounter among singularities along the lines of Baudelaire’s flâneur, as well as a site of insurgent political organization. And finally, the contemporary city is, like the factory, a site of exploitation, antagonism, conflict, and hence, of potential rebellion...

What will take the place of money, rent, and finance more generally — as representations of value — in the new forms of governance that Hardt and Negri envision?...Harvey implies that the common, like the socialist state or the communist international before it, requires institutions of its own, beginning with a medium of economic exchange...

Today governments and corporations, and other bits and pieces of modernity, combine to produce sovereign networks, all the nodes of which — including museums and libraries in the great metropolis, and satellites orbiting the earth — belong to the neoliberal republic of property. If another, common world is to be assembled outside of these networks, it would necessarily include the richly textured ruins of the public, as a medium and as a message.  ]]></description>
<dc:subject>public commons public_sphere Habermas counterpublics immaterial_labor labor finance biopolitics</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:8a9823b864c1/</dc:identifier>
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</item>
<item rdf:about="http://www.e-flux.com/journal/captives-of-the-cloud-part-i/">
    <title>Captives of the Cloud: Part I | e-flux</title>
    <dc:date>2012-09-08T06:29:59+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.e-flux.com/journal/captives-of-the-cloud-part-i/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[The cloud, as a planetary-scale infrastructure, was first made possible by an incremental rise in computing power, server space, and trans-continental fiber-optic connectivity. It is a by-product and parallel iteration of the global (information) economy, enabling a digital (social) marketplace on a worldwide scale. Many of the cloud’s most powerful companies no longer use the shared internet, but build their own dark fiber highways for convenience, resilience, and speed.2 In the cloud’s architecture of power, the early internet is eclipsed.

...Google, one of the world’s seven largest cloud companies, has recently compared itself to a bank.

...Where and by whom sites are registered and data is hosted matters a great deal in determining who gains access to and control over the data. For example, all data stored by US companies (or their subsidiaries) in non-US data centers falls under the jurisdiction of the USA Patriot Act.

...In Egypt, during the revolution, Facebook and Twitter played the role of subversive, uncensorable alternative media—in part because the servers of these wildly popular services were beyond the reach of local authorities. Indeed, Hosni Mubarak’s best bet to fend off the power of the internet was to switch it off entirely. To do so, “just a few phone calls probably sufficed.”19 While Mubarak’s ultima ratio as a sovereign ruler over Egyptian soil proved sufficient to wall the country off from the network, the violent crudeness of this act also demonstrated the dictator’s much more substantial lack of power over the network’s larger infrastructure. Sovereign control over the cloud, in contrast to authoritarian power-mongering, is a sophisticated affair. One might draw a very different map here: the global spread of the US cloud, for example, results in a kind of “super-jurisdiction” enjoyed by its host country... Super-jurisdiction means that the law of one country can, through various forms of cooperation and association implied by server locations and network connections, be extended into and enacted in another. The US, as a result of its unique position in managing the internet’s core, also has jurisdiction over all so-called top level domains, no matter where they are hosted and by whom.

...“Real name” requirements by the cloud-based social networking platforms Facebook and Google+ expressly attack anonymity and pseudonymity online, affecting the fundaments of political speech. Real name directives require users to register with a service using the name that is in their passport. The reasons given by cloud services for such real name requirements are vague—perhaps for fear of sounding too directly authoritarian. The preferred route, instead, is that of fatherly advice. Facebook claims that it has a real name policy “so that you always know who you’re connecting with,” while Google states that it requires real names so “that the people you want to connect with can find you.” These explanations gesture towards a conception of normative social arrangements...

The increasing prominence which cloud-based internet services, social media and VoIP technologies now enjoy over legacy tools of communication shows in how they enable new, virtually cost-free forms of organization.... The political, legal and jurisdictional consequences of the cloud are slowly becoming apparent—right at the time when we are unlikely to withdraw from it. The cloud is just too good. ]]></description>
<dc:subject>cloud storage data security surveillance hacking protest public_sphere</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:1add6eb20619/</dc:identifier>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:storage"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:data"/>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:protest"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://places.designobserver.com/feature/how-to-be-an-architecture-critic/32278/">
    <title>How to Be an Architecture Critic: Places: Design Observer</title>
    <dc:date>2012-03-02T00:02:45+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://places.designobserver.com/feature/how-to-be-an-architecture-critic/32278/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[Few practitioners of criticism meant to be critics. Criticism happened to them, through a combination of luck and outrage, at moments in cities when building outstripped sense. There are strong parallels between the architecture of the late 1950s, when Huxtable began her career as critic, and the building boom of the early 21st century. In both cases a certain amount of bedazzlement prevailed as glittering towers replaced brick-and-stucco neighborhoods. There were (and are) great pieces of architecture, but the speed of construction also fostered a culture of knock-offs — good ideas repeated in inhospitable places or with subpar materials.

Huxtable started her career as an assistant curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in the 1940s. She received a Fulbright in 1950 to study modern architecture in Italy and subsequently wrote a book on architect and engineer Pier Luigi Nervi. As one of few trained historians of the modern movement, she noticed gaps in the New York Times’s architecture coverage. Her sense of connoisseurship, distinguishing the best from the second-rate, served her from the very beginning of her career. In 1959 she wrote the Times editors a long letter in response to their positive review of a photography show on a modernist housing project in Caracas, Venezuela. Apparently, it looked great, but Huxtable had been there and had seen that the beautiful buildings did not work for their inhabitants. Her letter (printed in full) showed knowledge, passion and a critical voice, and the paper hired her.

In 1963 Huxtable became the Times’s first architecture critic. She held that position, with variations in title, until 1982 and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1970. What is charming and replicable about her first ten years as reviewer is the immediacy of her experience of so many great works of modern architecture: the Whitney Museum, the CBS Building, the glass canyons of Park Avenue, the marble plazas of Lincoln Center. Reading her pieces (collected in the wonderfully and evocatively named Kicked A Building Lately? and Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard?), it is clear that her first loyalty is to the citizens of New York — and that she thinks they deserve better.

Before she does anything else in “Sometimes We Do It Right,” Huxtable describes what she sees. This may seem rather simplistic, but it is a step many critics skip today, since most reviews come with a photograph or slideshow. These writers want to leap over the visual to get to larger concerns: the architect’s genius, the international trend at work, the latent theory in the practice. Huxtable gives the reader explicit directions about where to stand and candidly states what she notices, offering immediate insight into reading a building or the city. First, you have to be there. Critiquing renderings is often a necessity, but you cannot discern what works unless you have seen it, touched it, and experienced it in person....

Her words are active, giving the architecture a sense of movement — powerful play, gleaming, stony — that allows a reader to feel what she feels for a moment. Most buildings do not move, but they have impact, and transmitting that impact verbally can fire the imaginations of people who might just have walked on by. These adjectives give a taste of the rhetorical explosion to come in the writings of Herbert Muschamp, the Times’s architecture critic from 1992 to 2004. Huxtable has always been more reserved, but she manages to give buildings personality through well-chosen descriptors....

Happenstance, accretion, a change in neighbors can combine to create new beauty at any moment. The critic would not be doing her job if she did not think today could be as good as the past. And Huxtable, deeply involved in the preservation movement in New York City, would not be doing her job if she did not recognize the qualities of older buildings as well as the latest ones....

“Sometimes We Do It Right” includes a number of features that I would urge citizen critics to use in their own writing. One, description: She sets the scene, and her theme, through opening paragraphs that bring the city vividly to mind. Two, history: She demonstrates that the skyscraper is not something new (via her neighborhood tour) and that Marine Midland is part of a lineage (via her discussion of curtain walls). These glancing references establish her expertise (she knows more about this topic than most) and also sidestep a common problem: a gee-whiz awe at the latest and greatest model in the line. Three, drama: Many people consider architecture boring. The first line of defense against this charge is making the connection for the reader between how architecture looks and how it makes one feel. It’s not just a building but a speaking artifact. Finally, the Point: Huxtable has 1200 words with which to make her point. When you read her review, you feel at all times that she knows exactly where it is going. She has chosen the three areas she wants to highlight — the surroundings, the plaza, the building’s skin — and she makes them with all deliberate speed. (If you have selected a theme and a mode of organization, and if you know what your critical approach is, having a point shouldn’t be hard. Leave out more than you leave in.)

Huxtable’s modest, carefully articulated rallying cry is left to the end: “Space is meaningless without scale, containment, boundaries and direction. ... This is planning. It is the opposite of non-planning, or the normal patterns of New York development. See and savor it now, because it is carelessly disposed of.” Her method is developmental, leading the reader to agreement rather than telling them what they will learn at the outset. Huxtable is asking us to look at what is around the architecture as much as the building in question, calling our attention to what is really important to get right.]]></description>
<dc:subject>architectural_criticism public_sphere criticism media_architecture</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:b5191886006e/</dc:identifier>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:criticism"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:media_architecture"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://www.metropolismag.com/story/20120214/x-marks-the-spots">
    <title>X Marks the Spots [Studio-X] | Metropolis Magazine</title>
    <dc:date>2012-02-16T22:45:58+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.metropolismag.com/story/20120214/x-marks-the-spots</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[“The X just means we don’t know what’s going to happen,” he adds. This is the spirit of experimentation behind Studio-X, an ambitious global educational initiative currently underway at GSAPP. Equal parts learning space, public forum, and international think tank, Studio-X “affords an enormous bandwidth for thinking about the future of cities,” Wigley says—a mandate that he cites as the core mission of the program, and the reason he first proposed it four years ago... With sister offices now open in Mumbai, Amman, Beijing, and Rio de Janeiro, and more in the offing in South Africa and Japan, Studio-X New York is one spoke in a wheel of architectural activity that is at once international and intensely localized. The overseas branches aren’t intended to be subordinate to either Columbia or the Manhattan pilot office—“not like Starbucks selling some sort of wisdom from New York,” as Wigley puts it. They’re idea incubators in their own right, feeding new knowledge about how cities live and change into a greater community of thought... “It’s about expanding the notion of the university beyond the institution itself,” explains Jeffrey Johnson, the director of the New York–based China Megacities Lab, who has led groups of students on semiannual visits to Studio-X Beijing since it opened in 2009... Situated, like the New York studio, in the very heart of their respective downtowns, each Studio-X satellite operates as a discrete unit, with local directors setting a specific agenda. Yet all of the outposts, following the program’s mission, look to reinvigorate the urban conversation in their particular cities by engaging not just designers but culturally omnivrous thinkers from diverse backgrounds... Gavin Browning, who preceded Twilley and Manaugh at Studio-X New York, admits that the two halves of the Studio-X population are often “operating in separate spheres.”... The space’s social character is part of its appeal. “The potential for the contact there to be informal allows for discussions to take place that don’t take place in a more official setting,” says Jeffrey Inaba, the head of C-Lab, another fixture of Studio-X New York... And then there is the question of how the overseas locales are meant to work in concert with one another, as well as with the university. When they’re not being visited by one of the American student groups (which is to say, the majority of the year), the far-flung outposts operate entirely independently of Columbia. Although that gives them considerable leeway to chart their own course, it reduces the overall coherence of the program. “We all have access to each others’ planning calendars,” says Twilley, referring to her fellow Studio-X directors, “and I check what they’re up to.
But we haven’t translated that information into a coordinated series.”... Some of Studio-X’s satellites are located in places where certain political issues, the kind of things that might be spoken about freely on the campus of Columbia University, simply cannot be addressed. Wigley, who also sees the program as a vehicle for bringing corporate figures into architectural conversations, believes there’s room for healthy debate, but he tends to downplay the potential for outright conflict.  ]]></description>
<dc:subject>pedagogy design_education public_sphere discourse studio_x events event_space globalization networks</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:ed223746b427/</dc:identifier>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:events"/>
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</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://www.muac.unam.mx/webpage/ver_seccion.php?id_subseccion=8">
    <title>:: MUAC :: EXPERIMENTAL SPACE CONSTRUCTION OF MEANING</title>
    <dc:date>2012-01-10T21:57:12+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.muac.unam.mx/webpage/ver_seccion.php?id_subseccion=8</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[Via Google Translate: "EXPERIMENTAL SPACE CONSTRUCTION OF MEANING: The EECS invites visitors to take ownership of this space that promotes the active construction of communities, through various strategies that encourage socialization and construction of knowledge. Learn the different materials and dynamics that take place in this space and help to lead processes of research, reflection and questioning. / CONVERSATION: Conversations around the MUAC exhibitions with artists, curators and specialists in various fields of knowledge and art, in which the general public can take a seat at the table and enrich the discussion, not only through questions but present situations and concepts. Consultation events. // AREA OF OWNERSHIP: Visitors can be expressed through various media, where their views are reflected and reading open to all visitors. Also, the general public can conduct a conversation on issues, concerns and knowledge of their own, arising from the visit to the museum and the EECS. Participate in your next visit to the museum. // STOCK BUILDING: The EECS invites visitors to build a public record with materials donated by them, to share references, visual or hearing that echoed from the processes of reflection caused by the exhibition and documentary material found in the space itself .]]></description>
<dc:subject>popups libraries public_sphere museums public_space</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:10b0db0e01a3/</dc:identifier>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:libraries"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:museums"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_space"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://vimeo.com/21649437">
    <title>&quot;Paper&quot; on Vimeo</title>
    <dc:date>2011-09-05T06:53:54+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://vimeo.com/21649437</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["During its war with the Tamil Tigers, the Sri Lankan government restricted fuel, medicines and food items reaching the north and east of Sri Lanka. Even newsprint essential for printing newspapers came under the bans. The embargoes reached their peak during the 1990s.

Jaffna's newspapermen had to overcome scarcity to publish news of bombs and deaths."
]]></description>
<dc:subject>newspapers printing public_sphere video</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:a9034463342d/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:newspapers"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:printing"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:video"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://chronicle.com/blogs/worldwise/the-power-of-blogs-in-forming-new-fields-of-international-study/28638">
    <title>WorldWise - The Chronicle of Higher Education</title>
    <dc:date>2011-09-01T19:48:03+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://chronicle.com/blogs/worldwise/the-power-of-blogs-in-forming-new-fields-of-international-study/28638</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["I doubt that the growth of speculative realism would have been so insistent without these communities scattered all over the world, or so rapid. 1) they are a key preserve of particular communities like postgrads + early career researchers, not least because so much activity can go on below the radar, outside the attention of the kind of journals'/institutions' disciplinary policing. 2) they are a means for established figures to communicate in a different + more immediate register + often to become more prominent more quickly. 3) they are a much easier means of importing material from other disciplines, in ways which might be frowned upon if the material was to appear in formal outlets. 4) they allow all manner of researchers to communicate with each other, establish rdg groups; there is real debate. 5) new material reaches an audience much more rapidly than it would through the normal means of communication."
]]></description>
<dc:subject>UMS blogs academic_discourse discourse public_sphere speculative_realism object_oriented_philosophy</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:c3675007882e/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:UMS"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:blogs"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:academic_discourse"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:discourse"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:speculative_realism"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:object_oriented_philosophy"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/remembrance-of-message-boards-past/">
    <title>The Decline of the Online Message Board - NYTimes.com</title>
    <dc:date>2011-07-16T13:24:49+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/remembrance-of-message-boards-past/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["If urban history can be applied to virtual space and the evolution of the Web, the unruly and twisted message boards are Jane Jacobs. They were built for people, and without much regard to profit. How else do you get crowds of not especially lucrative demographics like flashlight buffs (candlepowerforums.com), feminists (bust.com) and jazz aficionados (forums.allaboutjazz.com)? By contrast, the Web 2.0 juggernauts like Facebook and YouTube are driven by metrics and supported by ads and data mining. They’re networks, and super-fast — but not communities, which are inefficient, emotive and comfortable. Facebook — with its clean lines and social expressways — is Robert Moses par excellence."
]]></description>
<dc:subject>public_sphere discourse social_media</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:e5e244483a29/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:discourse"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:social_media"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://remotedevice.net/blog/posting-anonymously-the-talking-statues-of-rome/">
    <title>Posting Anonymously: The Talking Statues of Rome | blog.remotedevice.net</title>
    <dc:date>2011-07-08T21:58:54+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://remotedevice.net/blog/posting-anonymously-the-talking-statues-of-rome/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["The talking statues of Rome (or the Congregation of Wits) provided an outlet for a form of anonymous political expression in Rome. Criticisms in the form of poems or witticisms were posted on well-known statues in Rome. It began in the 16th century and continues to the present day.

The first talking statue was that of Pasquino, a damaged piece of sculpture on a small piazza. In modern times the weathered fragment has been identified as representing the mythical king of Sparta, Menelaus, husband of Helen of Troy, and a major character in the Iliad, holding the body of Patroclus. In 1501, the statue was found during road construction and set up in the piazza; soon after small poems or epigrams critical of religious and civil authorities began to be posted on it."
]]></description>
<dc:subject>media_city media_space voice public_sphere print writing</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:d8cada0a8cf9/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:media_city"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:media_space"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:voice"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:print"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:writing"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://places.designobserver.com/feature/public-library-an-american-commons/26228/">
    <title>Public Library: An American Commons: Photographs: Places ...</title>
    <dc:date>2011-04-12T23:14:09+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://places.designobserver.com/feature/public-library-an-american-commons/26228/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["What’s at stake here is more than access to a room full of books. The modern American public library is reading room, book lender, video rental outlet, internet café, town hall, concert venue, youth activity center, research archive, history museum, art gallery, homeless day shelter, office suite, coffeeshop, seniors’ clubhouse and romantic hideaway rolled into one. [1] In small towns of the American West, it is also the post office and the backdrop of the local gun range. These are functions that the digital public libraries of the future will never be able to recreate.

Since 1994, Robert Dawson has surveyed hundreds of the more than 17,000 public libraries in the United States... Dawson’s photographs make the case for the public library as an American Commons, perhaps the greatest we’ve ever had."
]]></description>
<dc:subject>photography libraries public_space public_sphere</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:c9539ccd0bd7/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:photography"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:libraries"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_space"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/cyber-revolutions-2011-4/">
    <title>Why Revolutions Are Still Decided in Public Spaces, Not Online -- New York Magazine</title>
    <dc:date>2011-04-07T22:13:39+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/cyber-revolutions-2011-4/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["The Internet is great at facilitating bonds among compatriots who wouldn’t otherwise feel comfortable communicating openly and assembling a critical mass. But this concentration of like-minded people still exists in a silo, and the uninitiated might never find the hyperlink that leads them in. It takes physical space to connect revolutionary passions with daily life and, more important, the broader population. When citizens unite in a square, a park, or along a scenic beachfront to demand reform, it creates an impossible-to-ignore spectacle that draws the attention of anyone nearby, not to mention those watching at home....

...public spaces surrounding Umayyad Mosque in Damascus...In Bahrain, King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa has gone so far as to bulldoze the 300-foot monument at the center of Manama’s Pearl Square, hoping that might defuse the revolutionary yearnings...Libya’s rebels, meanwhile, have their strip of shoreline in Benghazi..."
]]></description>
<dc:subject>egypt public_space public_sphere media_city oral_culture protest</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:42ec23e3ae2c/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:egypt"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_space"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:media_city"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:oral_culture"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:protest"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://www.dwell.com/articles/design-and-history-of-tahrir-square.html">
    <title>Design and History of Tahrir Square - People - Dwell</title>
    <dc:date>2011-03-28T05:41:30+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.dwell.com/articles/design-and-history-of-tahrir-square.html</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[""Why from a design angle was it so successful as a point of protest?" Twenty-three streets lead to different parts of it, which is why it was so successful with the demonstrators. There isn't one big boulevard that you can block off, and there are two bridges that lead to it as well. One of them saw a clash between the regime and the demonstrators. It's also the case that all of downtown Cairo, which isn't that big, has a street that leads to side or another of Tahrir Square."
]]></description>
<dc:subject>media_city voice public_sphere egypt</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:084349cd7820/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:media_city"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:voice"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:egypt"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://places.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=25108">
    <title>Tahrir Square: Social Media, Public Space: Places: Design Observer</title>
    <dc:date>2011-03-07T03:42:15+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://places.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=25108</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["The January 25th Revolution has had a dramatic, immediate effect on how Egyptians occupy Cairo and interact with one another. Commentators in the West have been quick to credit online social networking with empowering the protests. But the revolution that started in January 2011 in Cairo has provided powerful evidence that the virtual is not enough: in the course of several historic days in Tahrir Square it became decisively clear that the occupation of physical urban space was, and continues to be, crucial to the success and continuity of the revolution.  Indeed, in the past few weeks Tahrir has became a truly public square. Before it was merely a big and busy traffic circle — and again, its limitations were the result of political design, of policies that not only discouraged but also prohibited public assembly.... over the years the state deployed the physical design of urban space as one of its chief means of discouraging democracy. "
]]></description>
<dc:subject>public_space public_sphere media_city oral_culture urban_planning social_media voice</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:ddcc8f8f5bd6/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_space"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:media_city"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:oral_culture"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:urban_planning"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:social_media"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:voice"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://urbanomnibus.net/2011/02/liberation-squares/">
    <title>Urban Omnibus » Liberation Squares</title>
    <dc:date>2011-03-04T06:23:40+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://urbanomnibus.net/2011/02/liberation-squares/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["As the revolution in Egypt has unfolded, much attention has been paid to the significance of Facebook and Twitter as organizing platforms for the revolutionaries. Indeed, the Mubarak government shut down the Internet over the past few weeks to limit communications, a move that proved futile in either suppressing the uprising or prolonging his rule.

Of equal, if not greater, importance has been the platform (a word that once referred to something exclusively physical) provided by Tahrir Square in central Cairo, the geographic epicenter of the revolt. The breathless images of men and women, young and old, civilian and military, galvanizers and galvanized, together setting up encampments and protests in Tahrir Square, also known as Liberation Square, give us faith not only in humanity’s common right to assemble but our common expectation that cities, by definition, must provide ever-restless places of assembly"
]]></description>
<dc:subject>media_city public_space public_sphere oral_culture voice</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:2f74ad5f08c5/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:media_city"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_space"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:oral_culture"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:voice"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://urbanomnibus.net/2010/12/new-city-reader/">
    <title>**Urban Omnibus » New City Reader - Kazys Varnelis</title>
    <dc:date>2011-02-20T08:21:11+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://urbanomnibus.net/2010/12/new-city-reader/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Joseph Grima and I were already talking about working together when he received a call from Richard Flood at the New Museum who was beginning the curatorial process for “The Last Newspaper.” Joseph and I were talking about how in the 1960s, artists and thinkers connected to obsolete practices in order to re-imagine contemporary possibilities. Newspapers are not yet obsolete, but we wanted to go back to earlier methods of producing and consuming newspapers as a way to investigate critically a variety of trends and practices in the contemporary city. Joseph immediately suggested a model he had seen in China, the Dàzìbào (大字报), or wall-mounted newspaper, meant to be read — and presumably discussed — in public. Then I began to do research into 19th century New York. A fascinating book called City Reading explains the proliferation of print culture in New York on the facades of buildings."
]]></description>
<dc:subject>urban_media reading newspapers public_space public_sphere textual_form</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:60dcebf4638d/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:urban_media"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:reading"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:newspapers"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_space"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:textual_form"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://www.archdaily.com/101596/critical-futures-debate-a-domus-event-in-london/?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ArchDaily+(Arch+Daily)&amp;utm_content=Google+Reader">
    <title>Critical Futures Debate: A Domus Event in London | ArchDaily</title>
    <dc:date>2011-02-20T07:53:20+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.archdaily.com/101596/critical-futures-debate-a-domus-event-in-london/?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ArchDaily+(Arch+Daily)&amp;utm_content=Google+Reader</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Over the past decade, epochal transformations have reshaped the context within which architecture is conceived and debated. The Internet has made images and information free and instantly ubiquitous; magazines... have been challenged to redefine their purpose and economic model in the light of dwindling readerships; blogs have given a global audience... to anyone with an Internet connection. In all of this, architecture criticism in the traditional sense appears to have all but vanished...As Peter Kelly, editor of Blueprint, wrote in a recent editorial, “As traditional publishing media and institutions become less influential, one wonders where architects can go to find informed, intelligent criticism of their work”.

Is criticism in the traditional sense still relevant or useful? If the role of the print publication in contemporary production irreversibly declines, what is its future role? What forces will shape architectural production in a post-critical environment?
]]></description>
<dc:subject>architectural_criticism design_criticism public_sphere media_form</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:a936c4e0bca5/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:architectural_criticism"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:design_criticism"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:media_form"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://hilobrow.com/2011/01/25/idler-academy/">
    <title>Idler Academy | HiLobrow</title>
    <dc:date>2011-01-25T19:53:53+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://hilobrow.com/2011/01/25/idler-academy/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[The Idler will open a bookstore and coffeehouse in the 18th century style, with lots of talks and events: "In Ancient Greece, the word for school, σχολή, also meant ‘leisure.’ Education was a pleasure; it was a privilege freely chosen by the freeborn citizens of Athens. The Idler Academy wants to bring this spirit of cultivated leisure to the 21st century, and cross it with the lively atmosphere of an 18th century coffeehouse. We will sell a wide range of new and secondhand books, largely educational in nature. We will serve excellent coffee and hot chocolate. We will sell games, curios and Idler clothes. We will provide delicious cakes. We will teach courses in academic and practical subjects, from Latin to embroidery, from book-keeping to ukulele, from life-drawing to herb growing. This is a place to read, think, debate and learn, to sharpen your mind and learn creative skills. Above all, we seek liberty, and our Latin motto, libertas per cultum, means ‘freedom through education."
]]></description>
<dc:subject>media_space books reading public_sphere bookstores</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:5db64567b3c6/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:media_space"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:books"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:reading"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:bookstores"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://www.state.gov/opinionspace/">
    <title>Opinion Space - U.S. Dept of State</title>
    <dc:date>2010-03-16T16:37:10+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.state.gov/opinionspace/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["The U.S. Department of State and UC Berkeley's Center for New Media are working together to explore new technologies that can solicit insightful ideas on U.S. foreign policy. Opinion Space is a new tool that uses data visualization and statistical analysis to give all participants an equal opportunity to have their opinions heard and to vote on the ideas of others."
]]></description>
<dc:subject>methodology public_sphere data_visualization</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:d47472653e42/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:methodology"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:data_visualization"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/2009/11/29/how-do-you-hide-behind-kindle-using-books-screens-screen">
    <title>How do you hide behind a Kindle? Using books as screens on screen | In Media Res</title>
    <dc:date>2009-12-07T04:34:22+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/2009/11/29/how-do-you-hide-behind-kindle-using-books-screens-screen</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><dc:subject>media_space public_space public_sphere textual_form conspicuous_consumption material_texts books</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:26dcdb5b471d/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:media_space"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_space"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:textual_form"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:conspicuous_consumption"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:material_texts"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:books"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://www.vanalen.org/fellowship/fellows/03_2009_commonTelic#bios_content%3Dtrue">
    <title>Van Alen Institute - common room and Telic Arts Exchange, New York Prize Fellow</title>
    <dc:date>2009-07-30T21:19:38+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.vanalen.org/fellowship/fellows/03_2009_commonTelic#bios_content%3Dtrue</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><dc:subject>pedagogy architecture teaching public_sphere institutional_critique</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:5e5bcc154b07/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:pedagogy"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:architecture"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:teaching"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:institutional_critique"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/575">
    <title>Our World Digitized: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly | MIT World</title>
    <dc:date>2009-06-04T12:57:05+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/575</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><dc:subject>internet democracy public_sphere</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:818339d84db7/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:internet"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:democracy"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://newecologyofthings.net/">
    <title>accd | mdp | net - The New Ecology of Things - Media Design Program - Art Center College of Design</title>
    <dc:date>2009-03-12T05:22:43+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://newecologyofthings.net/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><dc:subject>media_theory material_culture material_texts public_sphere things</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:1ad6f5b3ee8d/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:media_theory"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:material_culture"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:material_texts"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:things"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://christianschwartz.com/esb.shtml">
    <title>Schwartzco Inc.: Empire State Bldg Font</title>
    <dc:date>2008-05-07T02:59:39+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://christianschwartz.com/esb.shtml</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><dc:subject>public_space public_sphere lettering</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:4484e7ee2007/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_space"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:lettering"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://people-press.org/">
    <title>The Pew Research Center for the People &amp; the Press</title>
    <dc:date>2008-04-07T02:15:01+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://people-press.org/</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><dc:subject>research methodology media public_sphere newspapers</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:47e4b2da8455/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:research"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:methodology"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:media"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:newspapers"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://culturebase.org/home/struppek/HomepageEnglisch/Contact.htm">
    <title>Interactionfield - Public Space</title>
    <dc:date>2007-08-08T03:18:57+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://culturebase.org/home/struppek/HomepageEnglisch/Contact.htm</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><dc:subject>cities urban_media public_sphere research</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:3fbbc155f3c7/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:cities"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:urban_media"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:research"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://www.sarai.net/research/media-city/resouces/film-city-essays">
    <title>Is there a public in the cinema hall? Sarai.net</title>
    <dc:date>2007-08-07T13:07:20+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.sarai.net/research/media-city/resouces/film-city-essays</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><dc:subject>media_architecture exhibition film theater public_sphere india</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:48172c5f74d8/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:media_architecture"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:exhibition"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:film"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:theater"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:india"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://www.branchplant.com/design/idscp.html">
    <title>PLANT : Conversation Piece</title>
    <dc:date>2007-08-07T12:56:27+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://www.branchplant.com/design/idscp.html</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[Conversation Piece is a venue, container and initiator of the ritual of conversation. It is at once a room for conversation – the dining room – the table where telling can take place; and a repository of experience: the stuff of conversation.... The 21-foot long table and benches provides the place for gathering with family and friends and eating and talking. Packed tightly with drawers, it acts as table, sideboard, and holder of memorabilia of all past conversations – a container of conversation pieces.

The Conversation Piece, like a conversation, is a fluid architectural concept – alluding to both inside and outside : It is at once a porch looking on, or a dining pavilion in a forest, a mediaeval banquet hall laden with banners of fabric or a loft interior with a dramatic dining installation.]]></description>
<dc:subject>media_architecture public_sphere voice</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:9737cf5af886/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:media_architecture"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:voice"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://agoraxchange.net/index.php?page=218">
    <title>agoraXchange - Make the game, Change the world</title>
    <dc:date>2007-08-07T12:11:49+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://agoraxchange.net/index.php?page=218</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><dc:subject>media public_space digital public_sphere</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:44ac6e5799db/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:media"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_space"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:digital"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
<item rdf:about="http://positions.tudelft.nl/seminars.html">
    <title>Architectural Positions | Seminars</title>
    <dc:date>2007-08-07T04:42:10+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>http://positions.tudelft.nl/seminars.html</link>
    <dc:creator>shannon_mattern</dc:creator><dc:subject>media_architecture architecture public_sphere</dc:subject>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/b:c88c8f643f56/</dc:identifier>
<taxo:topics><rdf:Bag>	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:media_architecture"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:architecture"/>
	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:shannon_mattern/t:public_sphere"/>
</rdf:Bag></taxo:topics>
</item>
</rdf:RDF>