IMproPRieTies

Gay science

The Happy Tutor wishes to bring open dialog into the philanthropic community, but he has a tough crowd in his classroom:

Those who control that table, the financial planners, lawyers, and accountants . . . who control the planning table describe the conversation of purpose as "touchy feely," "soft," and essentially effeminate, he says.

Perhaps the Liberal Arts are in need of a macho injection.

Pesellino might be just the ticket:

Back-up squad includes Samson:

Labels: community, happy tutor, liberal arts, philanthropy, speech

Miracle of Qana

Apparently because it was commissioned for a Benedictine Monastery that observed the rule of silence, Veronese's Wedding at Cana, while offering the liveliest depiction of a social event rich in closely observed detail, choked with small intimate exchanges and interactions among more than 130 figures, does not in fact offer a single open mouth, the slightest visible intimation of actual speaking.

That's something of a miracle in itself, sort of not like Twitter.

Labels: community, silence, social media, speech, twitter

Community and/not social media

It's a measure of where we have traveled from the days of blogging that it is nearly impossible not to urge Inspector Lohmann to convert his magisterial blog posts on New Community of two years ago (already!), 1, 2, and 3, into a set of tweets.

Labels: community, inspector lohmann, social media, twitter

De-corporatizing the panhandling panjandrums

(Hokey newspaper headline free of charge)

Just a passing thought, listening to lawmakers' skepticism toward Eminem's neighbors' pleas for moolah: It seems to me that these companies are doomed by virtue of their coming to Congress as corporations. Their arguments reek of corporate interests. If they came as wounded communities (which is in fact what they are) - not just CEO's but workers and families and localities - and if they made the case that this is not about antiquated industries surviving, but about a malleable pile of capital and a group of people in transition, and here's an opportunity to help them out while reshaping GM, Chrysler, and Ford into entities that will genuinely become something else -- hybrid entities involved with life, health, finance, education, infrastructure, optimal safety and resource deployment -- i.e., if they were humble and open enough to consider inviting investors out and bringing people, a broader vision of agencies, and human values in -- they might have a shot at hearts and minds and the big bucks.

Labels: automakers, chrysler, community, corporations, economy, ethical economy, ford, gathering darkness of all USian culture, GM

New over there

Fwiw, a new post on the FASTforward blog: An adjacency of opposites.

Labels: advanced search, community, David Weinberger, fastforward08, jour

Destination blogs vs. en route twits

I'm not making much headway with the thought about the web and temporality. This might be relevant, or emulate bupkis:

Blogs will become something else. People are putting down roots that will require further software extravaganzas. One day you'll come to a blog and it will be like Second Life, except that blogger's life. The blog will be their home. You, avatar-neighbor, will go and visit Frank Paynter, or Brian Moffatt, and certain rooms will be open -- the library, the kitchen, in Frank's case perhaps a tractor ride -- avatar citizens will expatiate in the agora, and this will be very Web Arabicnumber.0.

It will be even more emphatically spatial than what we have now.

For the temporal (an aspect of it, anyway), for now it's Twitter that suffers the pressure of the moving arrow of time. The form -- 140 keystrokes that allow for verbal blats longer than mere acronymic ejaculation but too brief for anything like a discursive paragraph -- seems at first to deny all expectation of sense, certainly to deny anything like conversation. Until one realizes that it's not much interested in conversation. Other media are for that; Twitter is for non-sequiturial pinging, phaticking, sidewalk saluting, rendezvousing, emo-ing, screamo-ing, some nano-slice of your moment, then moving on, as your 140-character noodle dwindles down the timestream, getting lost amid the thicket of updates from others that continuously crowd in.

A blog might offer a flaneur's attending stroll through a land-, citi-, or idea-scape; twitter, more temporal, emits the dopplered odd yawp from a passing bus or subway.

Labels: avatars, blogs, community, second life, spatial, temporality, twitter

groping toward Coatlicue

From the madness of killing 33 strangers to the groping desperation of the public, it was a day that reminded you how clueless and on edge many Americans are... Dennis Perrin

And how unhelped they are by the vast resources of chromeblood USia. By, e.g.,