Peekaboo

If you're the type of person who won't get the discount grocery card because you think the shadow government will use it to track you via Predator drones, you should probably just skip past this. I've been deep in the world of Google Maps this week, trying and not quite succeeding at building automated tools to generate a grand North Country map to deliver NCPR news, events, photos, etc., by geographical location. Mapping tools have been getter better and easier to use over the last few years, and I think it is long overdue that the amorphous space of the Internet should become reattached to the communities people actually live in. So-called geofeeds are still fairly deep geek, but they have the potential to really change the relationship between the real and the virtual world.

Google Maps got its first boost from satellite imaging combined with global positioning technology. But over the last few years, they have been dispatching fleets of 360-degree camera cars down the roads and streets of the world to catalog street views and to synch them up with addresses. It's kind of creepy, and the practice is getting Google into hot-water with the privacy-sensitive German government. Here's NCPR as seen by Google Maps, at 80 E. Main Street, Canton NY. Top floor, right wing, three windows in--that's me waving at you from my office. You can not only find us, get driving directions to us, and find the nearest place that sells pizza--you can rotate the view and get a good look all around the neighborhood.

You really should get rid of that junker under the tarp. You know who you are. And now we know where you live.

Breathing the same air

Listening to the radio while doing chores, or playing a CD while driving a lonely stretch of road, it's easy to fall into the habit of thinking about music as a solitary experience. Cafes are full of people, each hearing their own soundtrack to life through earbuds. If we sing at all, it's to ourselves in the shower. Music is a commodity, served at a table for one.

What a change, then, to experience the real thing, the way humans have practiced the art for 20,000 years or so--as a community. Last Saturday I attended the spring concert of The Orchestra of Northern New York. While I haven't the ear to judge the quality of the performance--a program of Haydn and Beethoven--the quality of the experience was remarkable. Dozens of performers, many of them known to me, and hundreds of listeners, many also known to me, gathered in one room at one time, breathing the same air. The orchestra gave the gift of their practice and talent. The audience gave the gift of their attention and appreciation. They dressed up, put aside their other business, and traveled to be together for a single purpose. It happened in real time, from the opening theme to the final fall of the baton, becoming what it was moment by moment. If you weren't there, you missed it, and no recording can replace what you missed.

I will never forego the solitary pleasures of recorded music, and would never discourage anyone from listening to the radio--preferably to NCPR for hours each day. Just bear in mind that what you hear is only a synthetic echo of a moment, not the moment itself. For that, you need to go to where the music is being played.

Where we breathe

Before there was the Worldwide Web, there was the WELL, the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, an online community that served the technophiles of the Bay Area through a network of text bulletin boards and other services delivered over slow phone modems. It was a little slow, a little clunky, and highly geeky, but it had one advantage that has been lost in the online explosion since--it "mapped" onto a terrestrial community--it created an analog of where its participants lived, and was deeply involved with its issues and objectives.

I was an early fan of the WELL, reading about it in CoEvolution Quarterly. Ever since I first became involved in creating websites, I wanted to work in countertrend to the fragmentation and placelessness that characterized the new online world. In particular, I wanted to build a place within the web that corresponded to where I actually lived. I saw the traditional infrastructure that maintained my community falling apart, the informal network of churches and social clubs, local news in print and broadcast in decline, the increased busy-ness of workers and the corresponding decrease of community volunteers. If my work online served only to further distract people from the places where they made their lives, I would be part of the problem.

In the decade or more since, that fragmentation has only grown, and communities-- particularly small ones--struggle ever harder to keep together civic life. While the new online social tools dubbed "Web 2.0" have done amazing things in creating communities of affinity, I still look forward to a "Web 3.0" to serve our communities of residence. That's the place where we breathe the air.

Lean Regime

We would all have been living long since in communal Utopia, I am convinced, were it possible to share a kitchen without friction. As things stand, Middle East peace seems to be a less ambitious goal than kitchen comity. I have been through many schemes in a long career of communal home and work kitchens, each fine in theory, each, uhh--suboptimal in execution. There was the short-lived Procrustean democracy of seventies socialist living: from each, regardless of talent; to each, because it’s Thursday. Fasting also came into vogue about then, as I recall.

Work kitchens seem to cycle though a number of states, from Spartan disuse to competitive group force-feeding. But in all these states, domestic tranquility founders on the rock of cleaning up. It is a law of nature that at least one user will scatter food litter with the casual aplomb of a giraffe browsing the treetops, and another will always be just about to wash the dishes he/she left to soak in the sink. There will always be ancient mystery food in the fridge, waiting for someone to have the courage to pop the lid before the gases of decomposition do the job for him. These issues have once again led to an ardent round of station email, and to yet another ingenious peace plan--anything dirty will be disappeared. The Junta Plan, I call it. The kitchen, now containing many fewer items, does indeed look cleaner. But the day is not far off, I fear, when I will be stirring sugar into a mayonnaise jar full of coffee with a plastic fork.