Tag Archives ⇒ future

Chris Christie, meme muse

July 5, 2017
· Martin Kelley

Chris Christie is always good for inspir­ing memes but he out­did him­self this week when NJ Advanced Media staked him out and found him enjoy­ing a emp­ty beach on a closed state park with his fam­i­ly. The sto­ry behind the get is won­der­ful and all kudos to Andrew Mills and the team.

Here in no order and with no attri­bu­tion (sor­ry future meme researchers) are some of my favorite re-workings. The Bird­cage ver­sion made us laugh out loud so much that we knew we had to rewatch it that night.

And final­ly, a sand sculp­ture made on Island Beach State Park after the bud­get stand­off end­ed and the beach reopened: blank

The bandwidth of memories

April 20, 2017
· Martin Kelley

blankAnoth­er fam­i­ly vaca­tion is com­ing up, which for me means think­ing once more about the pre-nostalgia of fam­i­ly pho­tos. While blog posts are osten­si­bly for vis­i­tors, the audi­ence I care more about is actu­al­ly future me.

Just before a 2013 trip, I wrote “Nos­tal­gia Comes Ear­ly,” a post about mem­o­ries and why I go to the trou­ble to share these posts — as much with my future self as with read­ers (I con­tin­ued this thought lat­er with Recov­er­ing the Past Through Pho­tos).

Every suc­ces­sive fam­i­ly trip cre­ates a mag­ni­tude more data than the one pre­ced­ing it. I have exact­ly 10 pho­tos from the first time I vis­it­ed Walt Dis­ney World, with my then-fiancée in 2001. I have only fuzzy mem­o­ries of the trip. A year or so lat­er I returned back to Flori­da (Key West this time) for a hon­ey­moon with her, a trip that has zero pho­tos. I remem­ber maybe a half dozen things we did but few locales visited.

Con­trast this with a 2013 Dis­ney World trip, for which we made a whole blog, A Spe­cial WDW Fam­i­ly. The focus was trav­el­ing Dis­ney with autis­tic kids. There’s a lot of infor­ma­tion in there. We wrote about meals and rides, small vic­to­ries, and child melt­downs. The band­width of mem­o­ries isn’t just in the num­ber of jpeg files but in the dis­tinct mem­o­ries I have of the events of that week-plus.

We took many hun­dreds of pho­tos over our most recent fam­i­ly vaca­tion in Decem­ber 2015, only a small frac­tion of which went online. In addi­tion, I have Google Loca­tion data for the trip and Foursquare check­ins logged in Ever­note. I know how many steps I took each day. I know whether I had a good sleep. We didn’t make a pub­lic blog but we have a long anno­tate log of each restau­rant and stop, with anno­ta­tion tips to remind our future selves about how we could do things bet­ter in the future. The meta­da­ta is in itself not so impor­tant, but it’s use­ful to be able to drop into a day and remem­ber what we did and see the smiles (and tired­ness) on faces each day.

Distant signals from the future

January 19, 2016
· Martin Kelley

radioI was in ear­ly high school when I got my first alarm clock radio. My par­ents were a bit old­er when I was born, so the LPs in the back of our hall clos­et were a generation-and-a-half out-of date: I remem­ber most­ly musi­cal sound­tracks like South Pacif­ic and West Side Sto­ry. My old­er broth­er had brought the Bea­t­les into our house but he had moved away for col­lege and adult­hood years before and the only trace of his musi­cal influ­ence was a Simon & Gar­funkel great­est hits 8‑track tape my mom had bought for a pen­ny from the Time-Life record club.

In my bed­room late at night in the ear­ly 80s, I explored the sounds inside my new radio. I would bury myself under­neath my Star Trek sheets, pull the radio inside, and lis­ten with vol­ume bare­ly per­cep­ti­ble. Three was no real rea­son for the secre­cy. I’m sure my par­ents wouldn’t have par­tic­u­lar­ly cared. But I was a pri­vate kid. I didn’t want to let on that I was curi­ous about the adult world. Pop radio and MASH reruns were my secret.

I had had a short­wave radio in mid­dle school and brought the thrill of long-distance dis­cov­ery to my radio explo­rations. Geog­ra­phy and sound had more mys­tery in those days before the inter­net. On a cold, clear night, I could tune in AM pow­er­hous­es half a con­ti­nent away.

One par­tic­u­lar­ly cold night, one of these dis­tant sig­nals played a song I had nev­er heard or even imag­ined. It was half-drowned out by sta­t­ic. The sig­nal drift­ed in and out in waves but I lis­tened mes­mer­ized. To a intro­vert­ed kid in a sleep Philly sub­urb, this song was a key to a yearned-for future. I was instant­ly cer­tain that that no one around me had ever heard this song. If only I could make out some words, maybe I could spend the next year scan­ning the dis­tant radio bands to hear it again. As I got old­er, I could go into the city to scour bins in the seed­i­est of indie record stores. This song no one knew would be a touch­stones to a new adult­hood I was con­struct­ing in the secret of my bedroom.

As the fade came, I bare­ly caught the DJ’s words through the sta­t­ic. “Hotel Cal­i­for­nia.” I vowed to myself that some­day, some­how, I would find this song and hear it again.

RIP Glenn Frey.

Future of Quaker media at Pendle Hill next month

April 27, 2012
· Martin Kelley

I’m part of a dis­cus­sion at the Pen­dle Hill con­fer­ence cen­ter out­side Philadel­phia next month. Every­one’s invit­ed. It’s a rare chance to real­ly bring a lot of dif­fer­ent read­ers and media pro­duc­ers (offi­cial and DIY) togeth­er into the same room to map out where Quak­er media is head­ed. If you’re a pas­sion­ate read­er or think that Quak­er pub­li­ca­tions are vital to our spir­i­tu­al move­ment, then do try to make it out.

blankYoutube, Twit­ter, pod­casts, blogs, books. Where’s it all going and who’s doing it? How does it tie back to Quak­erism? What does it mean for Friends and our insti­tu­tions? Join pan­elists Charles Mar­tin, Gabriel Ehri and Mar­tin Kel­ley, along with Quak­er pub­lish­ers and writ­ers from around the world, and read­ers and media enthu­si­asts, for a wide-ranging dis­cus­sion about the future of Quak­er media.

We will begin with some wor­ship at 7.00pm If you’d like a deli­cious Pen­dle Hill din­ner before­hand please reply to the Face­book event wall (see http://​on​.fb​.me/​q​u​a​k​e​r​m​e​dia). Din­ner is at 6.00pm and will cost $12.50

This is part of this year’s Quak­ers Unit­ing in Pub­li­ca­tions con­fer­ence. QUIP has been hav­ing to re-imagine its role over the last ten years as so many of its anchor pub­lish­ers and book­stores have closed. I have a big con­cern that a lot of online Quak­er mate­r­i­al is being pro­duced by non-Quakers and/or in ways that aren’t real­ly root­ed in typ­i­cal Quak­er process­es. Maybe we can talk about that some at Pen­dle Hill.

Talk to the Future Video Magazine

October 1, 2008
· Martin Kelley

Talk to the FutureThese ‘pub­lic con­ver­sa­tions with today’s bold­est voic­es’ are the brain­child of San Fran­cis­co, Cal­i­for­nia-based activist jour­nal­ist Anne-christine d’Adesky. She’s trav­el­ing the world inter­view­ing pol­i­cy mak­ers and on-the-ground orga­niz­ers on issues of glob­al health and AIDS. The site uses Google Video and Mov­able Type to cre­ate an online video mag­a­zine.

Vis­it: Talk​tothe​fu​ture​.org and Acdadesky​.org

On job hunting and the blogging future in Metro Philadelphia

November 29, 2006
· Martin Kelley

I’ve been qui­et on the blogs late­ly, focus­ing on job search­es rather than rant­i­ng. I thought I’d take a lit­tle time off to talk about my lit­tle cor­ner of the career mar­ket. I’ve been apply­ing for a lot of web design and edit­ing jobs but the most inter­est­ing ones have com­bined these togeth­er in cre­ative ways. My qual­i­fi­ca­tions for these jobs are more the inde­pen­dent sites I’ve put togeth­er — notably Quak​erQuak​er​.org—than my paid work for Friends.

For exam­ple: one inter­est­ing job gets repost­ed every few weeks on Craigslist. It’s geared toward adding next-generation inter­ac­tive con­tent to the web­site of a con­sor­tium of sub­ur­ban news­pa­pers (appli­cants are asked to be “com­fort­able with terms like blog, vlog, CSS, YourHub, MySpace, YouTube…,” etc.). The qual­i­fi­ca­tions and vision are right up my alley but I’m still wait­ing to hear any­thing about the appli­ca­tion I sent by email and snail mail a week ago. Despite this, they’re con­tin­u­ing to post revised descrip­tions to Craigslist. Yes­ter­day’s ver­sion dropped the “con­ver­gence” lin­go and also dropped the pro­ject­ed salary by about ten grand.

About two months ago I actu­al­ly got through to an inter­view for a fab­u­lous job that con­sist­ed of putting togeth­er a blog­ging com­mu­ni­ty site to fea­ture the lesser-known and quirky busi­ness­es of Philadel­phia. I had a great inter­view, thought I had a good chance at the job and then heard noth­ing. Days turned to weeks as my follow-up com­mu­ni­ca­tions went unan­swered. 11/30 Update: a friend just guessed the group I was talk­ing about and emailed that the site did launch, just qui­et­ly. It looks good.

Cor­po­rate blog­ging is said to be the wave of the future and in only a few years polit­i­cal cam­paigns have come to con­sid­er blog­gers as an essen­tial tool in get­ting their mes­sage out. User-generated con­tent has become essen­tial feed­back and pub­lic­i­ty mech­a­nisms. My expe­ri­ence from the Quak­er world is that blog­gers are con­sti­tut­ing a new kind of lead­er­ship, one that’s both more out­go­ing but also thought­ful and vision­ary (I should post about this some­time soon). Blogs encour­age open­ness and trans­paren­cy and will sure­ly affect orga­ni­za­tion­al pol­i­tics more and more in the near future. Smart com­pa­nies and non­prof­its that want to grow in size and influ­ence will have to learn to play well with blogs.

But the future is lit­tle suc­cor to the present. In the Philadel­phia met­ro­pol­i­tan area it seems that the rare employ­er that’s think­ing in these terms have have a lot of back and forths try­ing to work out the job descrip­tion. Well, I only need one enlight­ened employ­er! It’s time now to put the boys to bed, then check the job boards again. Keep us in your prayers.

William Gibson: the future will find you out

June 28, 2003
· Martin Kelley

An inter­est­ing arti­cle on George Orwell and the future we’ve become. What would Orwell have thought about the big broth­er of nation­al secu­ri­ty and the never-ending war on ter­ror. And what would he have thought of the inter­net and blogs? Here’s a snippet:

“In the age of the leak and the blog, of evi­dence extrac­tion and link dis­cov­ery, truths will either out or be out­ed, lat­er if not soon­er. This is some­thing I would bring to the atten­tion of every diplo­mat, politi­cian and cor­po­rate leader: the future, even­tu­al­ly, will find you out.