Tag Archives: Draft

Nov 26

Make a buck, make a buck

Posted on by

“There’s a lot of bad ‘isms’ floatin’ around this world, but one of the worst is com­mer­cial­ism. Make a buck, make a buck.“
–Alfred, Mir­a­cle on 34th Street (1947)

Did Thanks­giv­ing even hap­pen? Walk­ing around the neigh­bor­hood and scan­ning the store cir­cu­lars it seems more like some blip between Hal­loween candy and Christ­mas toys. In 1947, Alfred’s Christ­mas ism was a fast-footed sprint launched by Santa’s appear­ance at the end of the Thanks­giv­ing parade (though with all due respect for Mr Macy, for us old time Philadel­phi­ans the finale will always be a red-coated fire­man climb­ing into Gimble’s fifth floor).

What was a six week sprint for Christ­mas sales in 1947 has stretched out to the leisurely half-mile jog through the autumn months. Trea­cly remakes of hol­i­day stan­dards have been play­ing in malls for weeks. Box store work­ers who might have pre­ferred to spend time with their fam­ily on Thanks­giv­ing were pressed into ser­vice for pre-Black Fri­day sales (fed by the hype of arti­fi­cial scarcity, it feeds the gam­bler gene’s need for the big win). And today, server farms around the coun­try are over­heat­ing to meet the demands of the lat­est retail gim­mick, the seven-year-old Cyber Mon­day (proof that cap­i­tal­ism hasn’t for­got­ten how to dream up more “make a buck” isms).

And all for what? Most of us mid­dle class Amer­i­cans have every­thing we need. What we lack isn’t the stuff that line the shelves of Wal­mart super­stores and Ama­zon dis­tri­b­u­tion cen­ters, but the us that we’re too busy to share with one another.

I love the purity of ear­lier gen­er­a­tions of Quak­ers. They point­edly ignored Christ­mas, work­ing and open­ing their schools on the 25th. They would have undoubt­edly skipped the com­mer­cial­ism of the mod­ern con­sumer hol­i­day. But I’m not will­ing to go that far. In our fam­ily Thanks­giv­ing and Christ­mas is a time of togeth­er­ness and sea­sonal habits–tag­ging the Christ­mas tree, Sweetzel’s spiced wafers, mak­ing cook­ies and pies, vis­it­ing fam­ily. When I was young, my mother made a framed col­lage of my annual pho­tos with Santa, and while it once fas­ci­nated me as a doc­u­ment of Santa vari­a­tions, now the inter­est is watch­ing myself grow up. Today, our family’s Flickr col­lec­tion of Christ­mas rou­tines shows that same pas­sage of time. None of us need fall into the Hal­loThanks­Mas sea­son of make-a-buck-ism to find joy in togetherness.

Nov 19

A social media snapshot

Posted on by

When I first started blog­ging fif­teen years ago, the process was sim­ple. I’d open up a file, hand-edit the HTML code and upload it to a webserver–those were the days! Now every social web ser­vice is like a blog unto itself. The way I have them inter­act is occa­sion­ally dizzy­ing even to me. Recently a friend asked on Face­book what peo­ple used Tum­blr for, and I thought it might be a good time to sur­vey my cur­rent web ser­vices. These shift and change con­stantly but per­haps oth­ers will find it an inter­est­ing snap­shot of hooked-together media circa 2012.

The glue ser­vices you don’t see:

  • Google Reader. I still try to keep up with about a hun­dred blogs, mostly spir­i­tual in nature. The old tried-and-true Google Reader still orga­nizes it all, though I often read it through the Android app News­Rob.
  • Diigo. This took the place of the clas­sic social book­mark­ing site Deli­cious when it had a near-death expe­ri­ence a few years ago (it’s never come back in a form that would make me recon­sider it). When­ever I see some­thing inter­est­ing I want to share, I post it here, where it gets cross-posted to my Twit­ter and Tum­blr sites. I’ve book­marked over 4500 sites over the last seven-plus years. It’s an essen­tial archive that I use for remem­ber­ing sites I’ve liked in the past. Diigo book­marks that are tagged “Quaker” get sucked into an alter­nate route where they become edi­tor fea­tures for Quak​erQuaker​.org.
  • Pocket (for­merly Read it Later). I’m in the envi­able posi­tion that many of my per­sonal inter­ests over­lap with my pro­fes­sional work. While work­ing, I’ll often find some inter­est­ing Quaker arti­cle that I want to read later. Hence Pocket, a ser­vice that will instantly book­mark the site and make it avail­able for later reading.
  • Flip­board is a great mobile app that lets you read arti­cles on top­ics you like. Com­bine it with Twit­ter lists and you have a per­son­al­ized read­ing list. I use this every day, mostly for blogs and news sites I like to read but don’t con­sider so essen­tial that I need to catch every­thing they publish.
  • Ifttt​.com. A handy ser­vice named after the log­i­cal con­struct “IF This, Then That,” Ifttt will take one social feed and cross-post it to another under var­i­ous con­di­tions. For exam­ple, I have Diigo posts cross-post to Twit­ter and Flickr posts cross­post to Face­book. Some of the Ifttt “recip­ies” are behind the scenes, like the one that takes every post on Word­Press and adds it to my pri­vate Ever­note account for archival purposes.

The Public-Facing Me:

  • Word­Press (Quak​er​ran​ter​.org). The blog you’re read­ing. It orig­i­nally started as a Move­able Type-powered blog when that was the hip blog­ging plat­form (I’m old). A few years ago I went through a painstak­ing process to bring it over to Word­Press in such a way that its Disqus-powered com­ments would be preserved.
  • Twit­ter. I’ve long loved Twit­ter, though like many techies I’m wor­ried about the direc­tion it’s headed. They’ve recently locked most of the ser­vices that read Twit­ter feeds and reprocess it. If this weren’t hap­pen­ing, I’d use it as a default chan­nel for just about every­thing. In the mean­time, only about half of my tweets are direct from the service–the remain­der are auto-imports from Diigo, Insta­gram, etc.
  • Tum­blr (Quack​Quack​.org). I like Tum­blr although my site there (quack​quack​.org) gets very few direct vis­its. I mostly use it as a “links blog” of inter­est­ing things I find in my inter­net wan­der­ings. Most items come in via Diigo, though if I have time I’ll sup­ple­ment things with my own thoughts or pic­tures. Most peo­ple prob­a­bly see this via the side­bar of the Quak­er­Ran­ter site.
  • Face­book. It may seem I post a lot on Face­book, but 95 per­cent of what goes up there is imported from some other ser­vice. But, because more peo­ple are on Face­book than any­where else, it’s the place I get the most com­ments. I gen­er­ally use it to reply to com­ments and see what friends are up to. I don’t like Face­book per se because of its pater­nal­ist con­trols on what can be seen and its recent moves to force con­tent providers to pay for vis­i­bil­ity for their own fan pages.
  • Flickr. Once the dar­ling of photo sites, Flickr’s been the heart­break of the hip­ster set more times than I can remem­ber. It has a ter­ri­ble mobile app and always lags behind every other ser­vice but I have over 4000 pic­tures going back to 2005. This is my photo archive (much more so than the fail­ing disk dri­ves on a suc­ces­sion of laptops).

Hon­or­able Mentions

  • I use Foursquare all the time but I don’t think many peo­ple notice it.
  • Right now, most of my pho­tos start off with the mobile app Insta­gram, handy despite the now-tired con­ceit of its square for­mat (cute when it was the artsy under­dog, cloy­ing now that it’s the billion-dollar main­stream service).
  • Like most of the planet I use Youtube for videos. I like Vimeo but Youtube is par­tic­u­larly con­ve­nient when shoot­ing from a Google-based phone and it’s where the view­ers are.
  • I gave up my old cus­tom site at Mar​tinKel​ley​.com for a Fla​vors​.me account. Its flex­i­bil­ity lets me eas­ily link to the ser­vices I use.

When I write all this out it seems so com­pli­cated. But the aim is con­ve­nience: a sim­ple few key­strokes that feed into ser­vices dis­sem­i­nate infor­ma­tion across a series of web presences.

Oct 26

The secret decoder ring for Red and Blue states

Posted on by

Some­thing that fas­ci­nates me is the sur­pris­ing glimpses of Quaker influ­ence in the wider world. Back in the Spring I drew out the pos­si­bil­ity of a Quaker con­nec­tion in Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s so-called “evo­lu­tion” on LGBTQ matters.

This week the New York Times Opin­ion­a­tor blog argues a Quaker con­nec­tion in the geog­ra­phy of “Red” and “Blue” states–those lean­ing Repub­li­can and Demo­c­ra­tic in gen­eral elec­tions. The sec­ond half of Steven Pinker’s “Why Are States So Red and Blue?” leans on David Hack­ett Fischer’s awe­some 1989 book Albion’s Seed. Sub­ti­tled “Four British Folk­ways in Amer­ica” it’s a kind of secret decoder ring for Amer­i­can cul­ture and politics.

Fis­cher argued that there were four very dif­fer­ent set­tle­ments in the Eng­lish colonies in the Amer­i­cas and that each put a defin­i­tive and last­ing stamp on the pop­u­la­tions that fol­lowed. I think he’s a bit over-deterministic but it’s still great fun and the the­sis does explain a lot. For exam­ple, the Scot-Irish lived in law­less region along the English-Scottish bor­der, where peo­ple had to defend them­selves; when they crossed the ocean they quickly went inland and their cul­tural descen­dants like law and order, guns and a judg­men­tal God. Quak­ers from the British mid­lands were another one of the four groups, coop­er­a­tive and peace-loving, the nat­ural pre­cur­sors to Blue states.

Now step back a bit and you real­ize this is incred­i­bly over-simplistic. Many Friends in the Delaware Val­ley and beyond have his­tor­i­cally been Repub­li­can, and many con­tinue as such (though they keep quiet among politically-liberal East Coast Friends). And the cur­rent Demo­c­ra­tic pres­i­dent per­son­ally approves U.S. assassination lists.

You will be for­given if you’ve clicked to Pinker’s blog post and can’t find Quak­ers. For some bizarre rea­son, he’s stripped reli­gion from Fischer’s argu­ment. Why? Polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness? Sim­plic­ity of argu­ment. Friends are summed up with the phrase “the North was largely set­tled by Eng­lish farm­ers.” Strange.

But despite these caveats, Fis­cher is fas­ci­nat­ing and Pinker’s extrap­o­la­tion to today’s polit­i­cal map is well worth a read, even if our con­tri­bu­tion to the dis­tri­b­u­tion of the Amer­i­can map goes un-cited.