It looks like the Boston Globe's days are numbered after down-to-the-wire negotiations between the Globe's union and its parent company, New York Times, Inc., failed to produce a tenable solution to the budget crunch stemming from faltering subscriptions and ad revenue.
Readers of this blog know how I feel about newspapers' old-media attempts to remain viable in the midst of a new media revolution (hint: annoyed and dismissive). This doesn't, of course, mean that I'm a fan of media outlets shutting down entirely; after all, it's true that new media journalism models rely on the work of reporters in the field, gathering stories and reporting them via some platform. But the traditional approach to journalism--two to three major papers in every major city--is no longer viable and may be unnecessary in a culture where everyone's a potential media outlet. We don't yet know what kinds of journalistic models are sustainable, or what approaches to reporting will matter to those who are joining the social revolution.
In related news, my blog got noticed by an editor at The Guardian, who solicited me to write for an online section of the paper called Comment is Free. My first post, a condensed version of my review of State of Play, is up here. I don't find my thrill at the awesomeness of getting picked up by a major media outlet at all contradictory to my stance on print media.
Boal was best known for his work in establishing the "Theatre of the Oppressed," an approach to public performance intended to draw spectators in to the action. In becoming active members of the live theatre, the public, the nominal "oppressed," have the chance to participate in and transform the conditions of their everyday lives.
TO (Theatre of the Oppressed) was used by peasants and workers; later, by teachers and students; now, also by artists, social workers, psychotherapists, NGOs... At first, in small, almost clandestine places. Now in the streets, schools, churches, trade-unions, regular theatres, prisons...
Theatre of the Oppressed is the Game of Dialogue: we play and learn together. All kinds of Games must have Discipline - clear rules that we must follow. At the same time, Games have absolute need of creativity and Freedom. TO is the perfect synthesis between the antithetic Discipline and Freedom. Without Discipline, there is no Social Life; without Freedom, there is no Life.
The Discipline of our Game is our belief that we that we must re-establish the right of everyone to exist in dignity. We believe that all of us are more, and much better, than what we think we are. We believe in solidarity.
The world got Augusto Boal for 78 years, and all it had to do was work to confront injustice and oppression. What a bargain.
In a precise exercise in timeliness, two days ago I explained on this blog how humankind might survive a zombie apocalypse. In that post, I explained that offering strategies for self-defense against zombies was the wrong conversation, and that instead, we need to focus on strategies for mass coordination using social tools. I wrote that "too much control of information in government hands can lead to mass information and, ultimately, disaster" and that the people can mobilize and coordinate mass defensive maneuvers using Twitter, text messaging, and smartmob tactics.
[n]ews of the zombie apocalypse swarmed through the Twittersphere, then the blogosphere, the statusphere, the vlogosphere, the Facebookosphere, the Xangasphere, the LavaLifeosphere, the mesosphere for some reason and the screamingmobosphere....
TV stations sent their bustiest reporters boldly into the fray as newer and better logos were designed. Morning shows asked viewers to text in their opinions of death by zombies - text 1 for "The undead should not eat our babies," text 2 for "The undead should."
"The undead should not" won decisively, except on Fox News.
The best part of the piece, though, is what happened in the comments section. The first response came from the Zombie Anti-Defamation League, which wrote:
We at the Zombie Anti Defamation League (zadl.org) object to the vitalist tone in which the article is written.
Too often in films, popular culture, and news reporting are our post-vital friends depicted as mindless ghouls. We would hope in these enlightened times of the 21st century, that we can finally begin to rise above those vitalist stereotypes, and present a more honest and inclusive view of Zombies. This is the reason for the ZADL. We do not seek to cast aspersions upon you, but only to provide a voice, and educate people about the vitalist attitudes that pervade our culture.
Words like "menace" and "undead" are considered distasteful to us, and we seek to change the dialog about Zombies by using more Zombie-conscious terms like "post vital."
We thank you for your attention in this matter.
Go to the article to read Paul Dailing's response to the ZADL.
Enough already. The information Hambling offers is sound, but his premise--that careful planning and the right weaponry can help you survive a zombie attack--is woefully misguided. This article, like so many others, asks and answers the wrong questions. It's not a matter of how to kill a zombie but how to coordinate a mass defense in the face of a zombie apocalypse. Unless we can find a way to shift the conversation toward the latter, the hope for human survival hovers right around zero percent.
First, the details. Hambling explains that while three major classes of zombie exist,
mostly you're likely to encounter the type of Alien Zombie favored by George Romero. These are reanimated by an extra-terrestrial force; this is an infectious form of zombiedom that seems to be spread via biting. They are oblivious to most injuries but can reliably be taken out by destroying their brain.
When battling this type of zombie, you are basically trying to stay alive and get to a place of safety, as there are likely to be far too many for you to defeat them.
While Hambling's assertion that this type of zombie is animated by extra-terrestrial force is a matter of some debate, he is correct to assert that this type of zombie is by far the most common. So-called "natural zombies" are created through the use of toxins leading to severe brain-damage and are therefore generally harmless. A second category, the "supernatural zombie," is supposedly animated via either angelic or demonic power; if you're faced with this kind of zombie, you have bigger things to worry about than surviving the actual attack. (Hint: hit your knees and get to a-praying.)
Hambling's list of defensive weaponry shows an impressive amount of research. His weapons of choice--flamethrowers and extended-magazine firearms--are the most likely to inflict the type of wide-range destruction necessary to escape zombie hordes. He also makes the important point that a cool head is required, as panicked shooting into a crowd of zombies will not result in the head-shots necessary to kill, and not simply slow, an approaching zombie. He points to a recent analysis of armed encounters with police officers:
The police officer's potential for hitting his adversary during armed confrontation has increased over the years and stands at slightly over 25% of the rounds fired. An assailant's skill was 11% in 1979...
In 1992 the overall police hit potential was 17%. Where distances could be determined, the hit percentages at distances under 15 yards were:
Less than 3 yards ..... 28% 3 yards to 7 yards .... 11% 7 yards to 15 yards . 4.2%
It has been assumed that if a man can hit a target at 50 yards he can certainly do the same at three feet. That assumption is not borne out by the reports.
An attempt was made to relate an officer's ability to strike a target in a combat situation to his range qualification scores. After making over 200 such comparisons, no firm conclusion was reached.
I'm not, in fact, taking issue with any of the suggestions Hambling offers in his article. The question is not whether zombies can be killed by calm, prepared citizens; the question is whether enough citizens can be prepared for the zombie apocalypse to successfully tamp down the invasion.
When it comes down to it, the issue is not one of weaponry; it's one of communication and coordination. After all, all the Glocks in the world are useless unless people know that only a headshot will stop a zombie. And even if everyone in Pittsburgh knows to shoot for the head, it's useless if nobody in Boston figures it out.
Creative new uses of social media tools offer us some hope that mass coordination can happen. As recent fictional accounts of zombie attacks demonstrate (see for example here, here, and here), too much control of information in government hands can lead to mass misinformation and, ultimately, disaster. We also know that traditional media sources like television and radio broadcasts, while useful for providing defense information, are useless for mass coordination. Assuming the internet and cell towers survive the first wave of the zombie attack, an engaged citizenry can share information, coordinate defensive maneuvers, and stake out safehouses for waiting out the invasion. Indeed, the social networking site Twitter already has a vital community developing around several zombie-related hashtags: #zombie, #zombies, and #apocalypse.
Cellphone communication--and especially the kind of mass mobilization through text messaging that we've seen in recent political uprisings (for example, the organizing of tax-protest teaparties through flashmob tactics)--offers an additional avenue for reaching people who are AFK and on the front lines.
Hambling's advice is solid and valid, but ultimately useless without a platform for spreading it. Our only hope--and it's a small one--is to work to shift the conversation away from weaponry and defense strategies and toward modes of communication in the case of zombie invasion.
One last thing: If the zombies invade, we may also have to kill everybody over the age of 50, since these people are known to lack facility with new media. It may be humankind's only hope for survival. Sorry, Mom.
It turns out that my employer, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, not only has varsity sports teams, it has 41 of them. Well, it used to have 41, until pressure to cut spending across the institute led to the elimination of eight different sports teams. The eliminated sports are: Alpine skiing, golf, men's and women's gymnastics, men's and women's ice hockey, pistol, and wrestling.
In a letter to the MIT community, Costantino Colombo, the Dean for Student Life, writes: "We make this decision with sadness and with great awareness of how painful it will be to many members of the MIT community." Colombo also explains, however, that the financial burden of supporting so many teams has weighed heavily on the Institute since before the economic downturn--mainly because sponsoring 41 sports is simply extremely expensive. According to Colombo, even after the cuts MIT still offers twice as many varsity sports as the average Division III university and will sponsor more sports than any Division III university in the nation.
Cutting sports teams is completely lame, of course, especially for the participating students. That doesn't mean I'm going to just ignore this from Will Hart, MIT's pistol coach:
“We’ve been a varsity club since 1937, so this is something entirely new for us,” Mr. Hart said of the pistol program, one of the top-ranked in the country and one of the institute’s most popular physical education classes.
“M.I.T. has a certain culture,” he added. “The students need release. I hope they find something else that was as close to enjoyable as their sport was.”
This sounds ominous. Do you think it was intentional?
In the April 23 New York Times, Liz Shannon Miller analyzes the newest platform in the gay marriage debate: online video.
The piece is titled, painfully, The Gay Marriage Debate and Online Video: So Right for Each Other, They Ought to Make It Legal. Assuming the cutesy headline doesn't leave you puking in your shoe, you can read on to learn about major internet video campaigns in the gay marriage debate. Miller focuses mainly on the "Gathering Storm" vid put out by the National Organization for Marriage (I wrote about it here), focusing on its big mistakes:
the immediately recognizable set-up (a diverse group of people standing in front of rainclouds), the extreme earnestness, and the over-reliance on the storm metaphor have made it an easy target for video mash-ups and parodies.... Oh, and the people featured in the real Gathering Storm ad? They’re actors. How do we know this? Because the Human Rights Campaign found the complete audition footage — and instead of claiming that it was faked, NOM filed a copyright claim with YouTube to have it removed, thus proving its veracity (the footage can still be found on Vimeo).
Other big moments for Miller: The remixes and parodies of "Gathering Storm" and the restart of the debate after celebrity blogger Perez Hilton, a judge for the Miss USA contest, asked Miss California her stance on gay marriage.
It's bad enough that this story feels kinda...old. After all, if there's time for the proliferation of creative responses that Miller points to, then the phenomenon is not actually news to most of us. What's worse is that Miller tries to argue that the key takeaway here is that hey, at least people are talking about gay marriage. She writes:
Each side of this debate comes to it from an incredibly personal place — after all, at the core of it we’re discussing the definition of love in the eyes of the government — and sometimes it seems like each side is more focused on energizing its base than actually trying to have a discussion about the issues. But along the way we get dozens of videos, millions of views, and thousands of comments. Whether it succeeds in changing anyone’s mind when it comes to such a personal issue is tough to say. But somewhere in this mess, people are actually trying to talk about it. Which is something (italics mine).
Nope, sorry. The main point is not that people are trying to talk about gay marriage--the main point is that NOM's ad campaign was an epic fail, and not just because its message is stupid and bigoted. NOM failed because it treated the internet like it was television, only more so. It figured, hey, let's make a really powerful video about why gay marriage is teh suck, put it online, and get people to forward it on to their friends. That way we'll recruit a whole army to get behind our evil, bigoted anti-gay agenda!
The problem for NOM is that the internet is not TV to the somethingth power. It's something else entirely--a new expressive space so different from TV that any comparison is utterly useless. Advertisers and technology writers who fail to treat it as such are making the Space Odyssey mistake. Clay Shirky describes a scene from 2001 in which
space stewardesses in pink miniskirts welcome the arriving passenger. This is the perfect, media-ready version of the future--the technology changes, hemlines remain the same, and life goes on much as today, except faster, higher, and shinier.
The takeaway of the NOM campaign and its parodies, and the immediate spread of the Miss California interview, and the spread of almost anything about gay marriage or gay rights that's in any way repurposable, is not the platitude that "at least people are trying to talk about it." The takeaway is that any campaign that treats people as passive consumers just sitting around waiting to be told what to think is so out of step with the social revolution brought about by new media that it's practically begging to be bitch-slapped by the people with the power to bite back, which is to say almost everybody.
For the first time in American history, someone has been convicted under a state hate crime statute for the murder of a transgendered person.
Allen Andrade, 32, was convicted today in a Denver court of first-degree murder and a bias-motivated crime for killing Angie Zapata, 18, in 2008. Andrate met Zapata, a transgendered woman who was biologically male, online and spent three days with her in Zapata's Greeley apartment prior to bludgeoning her to death with a fire extinguisher. For a sense of just how heinous Andrate's actions were, lookit CNN's summary of the police affidavit from the trial:
According to [the] affidavit Zapata was out of the apartment when Andrade noticed photographs that made him "question victim Zapata's sex."
Andrade confronted Zapata, who declared, "I am all woman." Andrade then grabbed Zapata and discovered male genitalia.
According to court records, Andrade told police he began hitting Zapata with his fists, knocking her to the ground. He then grabbed a fire extinguisher and twice hit her in the head.
Andrade told police he thought he had "killed it," referring to Zapata, and covered her with a blanket. Realizing what he had done, he then cleaned up the crime scene, the affidavit said.
Andrade told police he heard "gurgling" sounds coming from the victim and saw Zapata sitting up. He hit her again with the fire extinguisher, he said, according to the affidavit.
To repeat: When asked, Andrade said he thought he had "killed it"--"it" referring to Angie Zapata, an 18-year-old woman. Here she is:
In 2007, both houses of Congress passed a federal hate crime bill called the Matthew Shepard Act, but it died after famous homophobe and former President george w. bush threatened to veto it. Representatives have re-introduced the bill after President Obama indicated his support for the law.
I can't decide what's worse: Killing one woman in a homophobic rage or refusing to protect thousands of other Americans from the threat of people like Andrade.
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