• Flavorwire » What Comes After the Hipster? We Ask the Experts

  I agree with Bruce Michael Conforth here:
  QUOTE
  The sociologist Robert Jay Lifton has written about the “Protean Man” who is more comfortable with images than with words and with fragmentation than with wholes. This, of course, is nothing more than the fruition of McLuhan’s “the medium is the message.” It is our mediums that have become the driving forces in our culture and society, not the ideas they transmit. The Internet is reshaping not just the way we communicate but reprogramming our neurological makeup in ways we can’t even yet imagine. We want, indeed NEED, tiny instantaneous fragments of information: sound bytes, word bytes, info bytes, image bites… the instantaneously and ever changing visual imagery ushered in by things like MTV, computer screens, split screens, virtual reality, etc. And the speed by which things appear, go viral, and then are gone almost precludes the possibility of there being a subculture that lasts anywhere nearly as long as ones in the past have.

  And do you know what made the Beats, Hippies, and Punks possible more than anything else? There were no distractions. There were three television networks, no cable or satellite. There were only a few radio stations, and they still featured live, local djs. There were no video games, nothing digital, no iPods or mp3 players… there weren’t even cassette players for most of those times. There were no VHS tapes or DVDs or CDs… you wanted to see a movie you had to go to the theater. No Internet of course. No computers of any kind. There were no ATMs or credit cards… no cell phones… there weren’t even xerox machines until the 1970s. The only things we had were each other. The only things we could do was hang out together, talk, have sex, do drugs, and make our own music and art. Yes, there were all the cultural influences I mentioned earlier but the only way to share them all was face to face real human interaction.
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  tags: flavorwire hipsters trends futurismo

• Tech entrepreneurs use Italy’s design legacy as inspiration | SmartPlanet

  Learned about Openwear via this article.
  QUOTE
  Long before Silicon Valley began dominating the innovation landscape with its ambitious, creative engineers and designers, there was, of course, the Italian Renaissance. A recent event in Italy, World Wide Rome, placed the rich history of Italian design ingenuity in a contemporary context. It focused on start-ups and entrepreneurs with new business models based on digital fabrication and open-source production–and with the do-it-yourself trend of today’s “makers movement” in mind.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: inspiration italy design

• The Building You’re Sitting In Now Has Its Own Social Network, Too – Technology – The Atlantic Cities

  Not sure I’m ready for this…
  QUOTE
  The built environment, Boltuch and his colleagues believe, is in need of a social network of its own. So today they’re launching one – called Honest Buildings – that could connect people to the physical spaces where we live and work, the landlords (or companies) that own them, and the tuck-pointing guys and architecture firms who want to compete for our business.

  The scope of the site is a bit mindboggling; as of this morning, you can type in any address in America on Honest Buildings and generate a page devoted to it. Imagine, in other words, if Facebook came pre-loaded with a basic profile for every name in the phone book.
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  tags: socialmedia buildings architecture cities atlantic_cities technology honest_buildings

• City Seats: 14 Examples of Unconventional Urban Furniture | WebUrbanist

  Some great ideas for public seating here:
  QUOTE
  The boring benches installed in urban areas around the world are purely functional: you take a seat for a little while, and then you leave. But why shouldn’t public furniture be visually interesting, comfortable and even interactive as well? These 14 chairs, benches, loungers, tables and more often double as art objects, with designs that consider a wide range of needs.
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  tags: public_space seating benches urban_design cities furniture

• See-through solar window creator invents invisible wires | SmartPlanet

  I want smart windows on my house. I want a smart house.
  QUOTE
  On Thursday, New Energy Technologies announced a new complementary conductive wiring system that will transport electricity over glass windows laid out in a fine grid-like pattern that’s virtually transparent. United States Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) scientists collaborated on the technology.

  Architectural glass has can be found on many modern buildings. Apple has become renowned for encapsulating its stores in massive glass panels, and large glass windows have shrouded skyscrapers for decades. The business concept behind New Energy’s system is to retrofit these conventional glass structures.
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  tags: smartplanet windows solar_power energy glass

• Wood buildings reach new heights | SmartPlanet

  Amazing. It was news when British Columbia allowed 6-story wood-*frame* construction a couple of years ago. But *30* stories? Interesting, that this is coming out of Vancouver.
  QUOTE
  Architect Michael Green is designing a 30 story building constructed with wood in Vancouver and advocates for more tall wood buildings…
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  tags: architecture high_rise wood_frame_construction vancouver

• Why Conservatives Are Afraid of Cities – Politics – The Atlantic Cities

  The endangered middle class…
  QUOTE
  Several thousand years ago, Socrates and Plato warned that citizens who loved money above all would divide into rich and poor, with class war and mob rule the unhappy result. That’s a message Republicans still have a chance to deliver this election cycle. But it’ll take a change in the way they think about cultural politics to do it.
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  tags: atlantic_cities class_distinctions class politics cities

• What turns a man’s mind to mush? A female observer | SmartPlanet

  I think I knew this already. 😉
  QUOTE
  People tend to think of specific individuals as having performance anxiety, but it may actually be a whole gender.

  A new study show that men’s cognitive performance declines if they will be told a woman will watch them. And that’s it. The woman doesn’t actually have to watch them and they don’t even need to see her for their cognitive functioning to suffer.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: psychology smartplanet gender women

• What Do Fact-Checkers and Anesthesiologists Have in Common? – David Zweig – Entertainment – The Atlantic

  This is fantastically interesting, especially in light of the recent fiascos around Mike Daisey and Malcolm Gladwell, both of whom seem to think that disrespecting journalism and factuality is somehow ok.
  QUOTE
  The book is a reprint of an essay about a suicide in Las Vegas that D’Agata submitted to the Believer along with text from the wildly extended and heated argument that then ensued between him and Fingal, his fact checker at the magazine. Things started off poorly. The now-infamous first sentence alone was riddled with errors. Here’s just one of them: D’Agata writes that there were “34 licensed strip clubs” in Vegas at the time of the suicide. Fingal’s research suggests there were only 31, and he asks D’Agata how he got 34. “Because the rhythm of ’34’ works better in that sentence than the rhythm of ’31,'” D’Agata replies, as if this were a fiction workshop. Things degenerate from there.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: atlantic_monthly fact_checking david_zweig journalism

• I’m Being Followed: How Google—and 104 Other Companies—Are Tracking Me on the Web – Alexis Madrigal – Technology – The Atlantic

  As an aside: actually, there are people working on the idea of users owning their data – and selling it to companies.
  QUOTE
  The bad news is that people haven’t taken control of the data that’s being collected and traded about them. The good news is that — in a quite literal sense — simply thinking differently about this advertising business can change the way that it works. After all, if you take these companies at their word, they exist to serve users as much as to serve their clients.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: atlantic_cities privacy advertising

• Why Don’t Real Estate Developers Just Ask Us What We Want? – Neighborhoods – The Atlantic Cities

  Article about popularise.com – sounds intriguing:
  QUOTE
  “We found a lot of the answers people were putting out were not directly answering our question, which is what do you want here?” Miller says. “It was ‘what do I want in my neighborhood?’”

  But this isn’t a bad result. If anything, the flood of random ideas reflects the fact that no one has been asking these people what they want at all. It’s like they’ve just been waiting to plead for a fitness center, and these are the first folks to come along remotely broaching the topic.

  Miller says one of the Popularise front-runners – a local bar manager who wants to open his own spot – was even offered a property two blocks down the street and $150,000 in build-out capital by another developer in the neighborhood, thanks to the display of enthusiasm on the site.

  “When we saw that it was like, ‘OK, this is not a zero-sum game on our property,” Miller says. “We should rethink of it as what do people want in their neighborhood?”
  UNQUOTE

  tags: atlantic_cities real_estate urban_development

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted: 03|25|12 at 10:55 am. Filed under: links.

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