Last week’s New Yorker cover struck me with some mixed emotions. Great to see it take the format of Time, Life and other “people” oriented news magazines by featuring the portrait of a person of prominence (yeah, whatever). Actually, a very important figure, our new President, Barack Obama.But a couple of things seemed amiss. First, it didn’t really look like the thin and point-featured Barack Obama I’d come to be familiar with from news sources. No, this one looked more like… Denzel Washington? Then again, what was with the Washington wig?The portrait is called, “The First.” Its clearly intended to give the subject, our 44th, some historical weight. Wait, except he doesn’t need any. His movement, his message, his election *are* the historical weight.To be fair, this cover is about race. At least that’s what the association between the portrait and the title is intended to inspire. And I don’t want to dismiss that. In fact, I think David Remnick’s piece in this week’s magazine is an eloquent, memorable testimony to this important moment in history. Putting a wig on the President and dressing him in 18th century attire and associating him with a leader who, having showed great courage in many ways, did little as president to support the cause of slavery seems awkward and confused.No doubt as President Obama builds his own legacy as the nation’s top leader, the need to project the trappings and images of history will fall away and he will emerge into popular art unadorned, unencumbered. I will look forward to the end of the backward glancing arts.
NetSquared’s N2 Think Tank asks, “What was the best example or lesson learned about leveraging social media from the political campaigns this year? We saw candidates speaking to citizens through various mechanisms, but we also know that candidates have a lot more money than most of our nonprofit organizations (even if the tools are free, staffing and strategy development isn’t). What social media tools, tricks, and strategies were employed that could be used successfully with nonprofits?”
So I’m not going to talk about a particular technology (its pretty clear from basic data available that the Obama Campaign ran a stronger presence across pretty much all platforms and tools, and part of that is money and lessons from ’04 and netroots connections into the campaign HQ) but rather about something I sensed is very unique to this year’s contest, and to the Obama campaign in particular, which is this:
Appropriation and DIY messaging. (more…)
I sure would like to be in New Orleans Saturday when Prospect.1 New Orleans opens in the Lower Ninth Ward and throughout the city. Its going to be, “the largest exhibition of contemporary art” in the U.S. – ever. Well, that’s according to the New York Times, with a bit of hedging with a “billed as” bit. Nevertheless, 81 artists, 50,000 out of town visitors and installations scattered across the city – some of which are overtly Katrina related – cited are Wangechi Mutu and her “Ghost House” and “Mithra,” a massive ark-like creation by the LA painter Mark Bradford. Both look like they’re using lots of reclaimed materials. Brilliant.Read the full article about Prospect.1 at NYTimes.com
For the last several years, I’ve had the privilege of writing a monthly round-up of news related to the field of ‘deliberative democracy’ – participation as conversation, you might say. All of the recent news about a “food crisis” – which smacks of disingenuousness in the face of years of trade liberalization – got me thinking how public deliberation might play a role informing the policy debates. For that, we need active citizens.
The world’s growing food crisis highlights a modern challenge to democratic governments: participation in relief and development activities. Not only do citizens in many advanced industrialized nations have low levels of knowledge about foreign affairs, the aren’t particularly interested to do something about it. And so modern “disasters” – economically engineered rather than naturally occurring threats to humankind – result in sudden and dramatic changes in the quality of life for millions, if not billions, of people around the world (see commondreams.org’s The World Food Crisis).
Some theorists have argued in the past that deliberation isn’t good for activists, because it forces compromise when what their constituents need are clear victories that deliver the goods. The other side argues that a “win” isn’t sustainable unless it has buy-in from the broader public and a larger constellation of stake-holders. The latest global food crisis – which has precipitated rioting in the streets around the world and engendered political hand-wringing in the North and outrage in the South – surfaces many cross-cutting issues that illustrate the paradoxes of our age. Here are a few worth talking about:
- Agricultural subsidies and tariffs: when we “protect” local productive capacity by stimulating local investments while raising the costs of cheap agricultural imports, are we raising a defense against the shock of spiking food costs?
- Genetically modified foods: Do GMOs offer a way out of the food crisis? Proponents are vehement about the positives while opponents argue for greater local control of crop production.
- U.S. Leadership: The U.N.’s World Food Program faces a budget shortfall of $755million, in part due to declines in U.S. funding as well as its habit of not paying up.
- “Peak oil” and biofuels: One reason for the dramatic spike in food costs has been the growing market for alternative energy sources, namely “biofuels” – is this a devil’s bargain?
These are only a smattering of the issues brought into sharp focus by the latest food “shortage” crisis – and as ever, crystalizes the role an engaged public can play in setting public policy priorities, foreign and domestic.
There’s an interesting model of neighborhood-based social networking evolving in Vermont called the Front Porch Forum. I was recently struck by its connection to broad, national concern about the loss of local news coverage. But before I go further, I have to confess some skepticism about the recent sense of malaise around the media. Here’s why:
Just about everywhere you turn, you are bound to read omphaloskeptic writing about the sufferance of media – its consolidation, how it is biased, how there has been a turn from the local, and certainly the absence of an “alternative” voice. At its finest, some have even called Viacom-produced shows like the “Colbert Report” “independent” news sources. This all plays up the general state of disarray and incoherence out there – but not, at least to me, a state of crisis. And perhaps part of the equation lies in some of the unique qualities of a state like Vermont: small, northern, rural, inconsequential, largely and often overlooked. Perhaps this has allowed something other than the dominant narratives to play out among our bonny green hills.
One of those is the healthy ecology of small town newspapers. Right here in the northern piedmont we have more than a dozen local papers serving a disbursed population of roughly 70,000. Which are all complemented by the circulation of the larger area papers – the Times Argus, Burlington Free Press as well as out of state ones, including the Boston Globe and the New York Times.
So why the health of so many local papers?
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