New media musings; quo vadis?

If I'm asking a rhetorical question about new media, I think it should be "Qua es vos iens" instead of "Quo vadis." I think. I guess it doesn't matter though. Latin's dead and everybody knows what "Quo vadis" means. Right? Well just in case, "Quo vadis" means "where are you going?"

I've been talking a lot about new media and social networking for the last couple of weeks. I never set out to become some kind of a player in the communication revolution going on in the world, but from the sound of things, that's precisely what I've become. I say from the sound of things, because I get approached pretty often by people who are looking for my opinion on these matters. This amuses me to no end. I'm just a guy of varied interests who likes to write. But I'm also someone who's been infected with a zealot's passion about all things new media. Even though I never set out to do anything but provide an online resource for my clients, this blog has taken on a life of its own and in so doing, it lit a fire inside of me I never knew was there.

I am amazed by the number of people I've met through this blog. And these are people with whom I've cultivated real relationships, despite the fact that I've never "met" most of them in the traditional sense. Were it not for blogging, news aggregators, Twitter and Facebook there is no way our paths would have crossed. Or could have crossed. This kind of global community building was impossible a short time ago. Never before in human history has it been possible to connect with people on a global scale like this. It's new, it's interesting as all get out and it's happening at increasing speed. I find it thrilling, but a surprising number of people are petrified by it. Along those lines, this video was being batted around Twitter this week:




Pretty wild stuff. This communication revolution isn't without its detractors or its casualties though. I've been a diehard newspaper guy my whole life and it's painful to watch them committing hara-kiri. I'm convinced that it is a suicide though. Print media won't adapt to the changing ways people get information and they won't let go of an old business model. Journalism's not going anywhere and Lord knows punditry's not either. But the idea of buying a newspaper every morning is dying fast. I'll miss newspapers as I've known them my whole life, but if we're lucky they'll take local TV news with them to the gallows.

Last Sunday I was caught in a traffic jam of biblical proportions on the freeway that connects Orlando to Tampa and then to St. Pete. What's ordinarily a two- to two-and-a-half hour drive turned into a five-hour-long ordeal. Clearly, there was a problem somewhere on I-4. As I was sitting in traffic, I started looking for a live traffic report on my iPhone so that I could find out what was happening and how long I could expect to be delayed. I Googled every search term I could think of but could only find the most vague of mentions of what I was involved in.

This is an actual photo I uploaded to Twitter as I sat in traffic last Sunday.

Whatever it was that was causing the delay, I couldn't find anything substantive on the websites of the newspapers or TV stations from Orlando, Tampa or Lakeland. It was a Sunday afternoon after all. So on a whim, I started Tweeting about being stuck on I-4. There were thousands of cars sitting all around me and as I started searching for Tweets about Sunday afternoon traffic in central Florida, I hit a goldmine of other people who were stuck in the same jam and Tweeting about it. Within five minutes I learned that there was a massive pile up about 20 miles ahead of me and that there was another big one about 50 miles ahead of it. These pile ups affected hundreds of thousands of people that day, not the thousands I suspected.

The traffic woes had erupted quickly and since it was at 5pm on a Sunday, the traditional new sources couldn't or hadn't responded to it yet. However, a couple of hundred participants in the actual event were armed with smartphones and Twitter accounts, and together we pieced together what had happened and how long we'd be sitting in traffic. That knowledge didn't speed anything up or make it better, but it sure was nice to know what to expect. It was a perfect illustration of the power of new media, or citizen journalists, or the communication revolution or whatever you want to call it.

I hear and read all of the hand wringing and the dire predictions of a falling sky, but I don't believe it for a second. It's human nature for some people to resist technological change. In another great find from Twitter this week, someone Tweeted a link to a blog called Alas, a blog. The post on Alas, a blog was an excerpt of an interview from Slate with a man named Dennis Barron. Dennis Barron just wrote a book about social media called A Better Pencil.

From the piece in Slate:

By now the arguments are familiar: Facebook is ruining our social relationships; Google is making us dumber; texting is destroying the English language as we know it. We're facing a crisis, one that could very well corrode the way humans have communicated since we first evolved from apes. What we need, so say these proud Luddites, is to turn our backs on technology and embrace not the keyboard, but the pencil.

Such sentiments, in the opinion of Dennis Baron, are nostalgic, uninformed hogwash. A professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Baron seeks to provide the historical context that is often missing from debates about the way technology is transforming our lives in his new book, "A Better Pencil." His thesis is clear: Every communication advancement throughout human history, from the pencil to the typewriter to writing itself, has been met with fear, skepticism and a longing for the medium that's been displaced.

Historically, when the new communication device comes out, the reaction tends to be divided. Some people think it's the best thing since sliced bread; other people fear it as the end of civilization as we know it. And most people take a wait and see attitude. And if it does something that they're interested in, they pick up on it, if it doesn't, they don't buy into it.

I start with Plato's critique of writing where he says that if we depend on writing, we will lose the ability to remember things. Our memory will become weak. And he also criticizes writing because the written text is not interactive in the way spoken communication is. He also says that written words are essentially shadows of the things they represent. They're not the thing itself. Of course we remember all this because Plato wrote it down -- the ultimate irony.

We hear a thousand objections of this sort throughout history: Thoreau objecting to the telegraph, because even though it speeds things up, people won't have anything to say to one another. Then we have Samuel Morse, who invents the telegraph, objecting to the telephone because nothing important is ever going to be done over the telephone because there's no way to preserve or record a phone conversation. There were complaints about typewriters making writing too mechanical, too distant -- it disconnects the author from the words. That a pen and pencil connects you more directly with the page. And then with the computer, you have the whole range of "this is going to revolutionize everything" versus "this is going to destroy everything."

I think I just added a new title to my reading list. But I think I'll buy a copy of it for my Kindle.

A shower fit for a king

In about three hours I'm going to sign a contract on a house renovation. It's a nice job, we're transforming a waterfront ranch house that's currently a rabbit warren of small rooms into an open floor plan with a water view from nearly every room in the house. The centerpiece of the new floor plan is a large, efficient kitchen of course. There's also a reconstructed master suite. The current master bath is a thirty-year-old afterthought. It's what a bathroom looked like in its day, and mercifully that day has passed.

Make that, it's about to pass.

The new bath has an open shower in it and more than any other aspect of this project, I cannot wait to see this shower once it's built. I've put together similar showers before but the shower in this job will feature a Sensori shower by Brizo. I've specified Brizo faucets before, but this is my first Sensori shower .

Ordinary shower systems are complicated, unnecessarily so. Cobbling one together using another brand's components was always a crap shoot. Manufacturers tend not to make whole suites of shower fixtures and it can be frustrating to try to put together a multiple component shower that has some cohesion. Is it too much to ask that the body sprays, handhelds, ceiling-mounted showerheads, mixer valves, etc., all look the same and have the same finish? Unfortunately, it is too much to ask of most brands.

However, like so much of what Brizo does, Brizo threw away the business as usual and started over when they developed the Sensori shower system. Each collection is a complete collection of coordinated parts available in all of Brizo's finishes. Specifying shower parts is now an à la carte process. I pick the parts from a list, specify the finish and I'm done.

The technical part's relatively easy too. Brizo's website has a custom planning guide that takes the guesswork out of the plumbing side of these showers. I'm impressed with the thought that went into these showers, add to that that these components are exceptionally well made and we have a winner all around. My clients know that I'm pretty jazzed by this shower, but they have no clue the wonders that await them when this project's complete. I cannot wait to hear what they think when it's all finished.

Go for it Melody!

The image above was taken in downtown Lancaster, PA. Lancaster's my home town. Actually, I grew up in a one-horse town just north of Lancaster, but Lancaster's a good reference point. Besides, it's a lovely town. Another good friend of mine hails from Lancaster too.

Melody McFarland grew up in different one-horse town a couple of miles away from the one where I did. Our paths probably crossed hundreds of times, though we never met. When we did meet, it was many years after we left our quiet home town. She lived in Japan then and I lived in Florida. Melody's one of my favorite people. She has a perspective I admire and more talent than should be allowed by law.

After a nearly 20 year absence, Melody and her husband moved back to Lancaster last summer. The reports of profound culture shock I was expecting never materialized. Instead, Melody's found her way into the burgeoning art scene in once-sleepy Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Melody's a biologist by training and an artist at heart. She's a photographer's photographer and I have long admired her work. This weekend, she's mounting her first public exhibition of her photography. Yokosuka in Lancaster opens at Circa, in downtown Lancaster tomorrow evening. If you find yourself anywhere near South-Central Pennsylvania this weekend, head over to Circa and see some of Melody's work.

Melody's exhibition consists of images she captured while she lived in Yokosuka, a city at the mouth of Tokyo Bay. Her goal in this collection of photographs is to show images of Japan that get beyond the expected. You won't find any sumo wrestlers or cherry blossoms, but you will find long-horned beetles and the close up of a crow's eye.

I love her ability to find beauty in unexpected places and settings. Through her camera's lens, anyone can see the wonder she sees when she comes upon a stinkbug or a stand of azaleas on a misty morning. Hers is an appealing and inviting perspective and I can't get enough of it.

I've included some of her images in this post, and she has the rest of them (along with a price list) on her blog, I Like Pigeons Because Nobody Else Does. Break a leg Mel, you're going to do great!

More lighting fun with Kichler's Design Pro LEDs

Last January, I wrote two posts introducing Kichler's Design Pro LED lighting. You can read them here and here. Back then, the Pro series had to two models of under cabinet lighting. What's really interesting about Kichler's Design Pro LED lighting series is that the warm, white light they produce is similar to the light produced by an incandescent bulb. The similarities stop there though. The LEDs used in Kichler's Design Pro lights uses 75% less electricity and each bulb is rated with a 40,000 hour lifespan. That's 20 years. The energy and replacement light bulb savings over the course of 20 years makes the initial cost of LED lights a bargain.

Kichler just added onto the Design Pro series in the form of these rail lights.

The first is a modern, urban four-light rail. It's available in a brushed nickel finish with a white glass shade. Each light along the rail swivels independently.

And the second is a more transitional four-light rail. It's available in the brushed nickel finish with white glass as well as in an Olde Bronze finish with a light umber glass shade. As with its more modern cousin, each light swivels independently on this fixture.

Here's the more modern rail in a bathroom, and you can see the independent swiveling in action. That these lights can be positioned independently is the key feature here. This means that you can use the rail fixtures above an island with the shades positioned for reading the newspaper, or in the kitchen, trained toward a counter for food preparation. Each shade swivels 90 degrees and rotates up to 359 degrees. Each model has the same dimensions, 42-and-a-half inches in length, four-and-a-half inches in width and nine inches in height. These are substantial fixtures that when when placed properly, will provide years of proper lighting.

These are great features and that's a huge amount of light coming out of an LED. Kichler is really onto something with this Pro series. These lights are available at independent lighting showrooms and you can learn more about them on Kichler's website.

Rachele from The Conscious Kitchen installed Kichler's Design Pro LED under cabinet lights in her recent and beautiful kitchen renovation. I wonder what it would take to get her to weigh in with an opinion about them... Rachele?

More to love about New York and more art underground

I brought up New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority and their Arts for Transit program a couple of weeks ago. The MTA dedicates 1% of the money it brings in every year to fund permanent art installations throughout New York's entire transit system.

Over the course of the last 21 years, the MTA has assembled what's clearly New York's most expansive art collection. The works are all site-specific and feature media that range from mosaic to cast bronze and from faceted glass to enamel.

My smart friend Tom knows I love the Arts for Transit program and he sent me some images of some gorgeous mosaics located throughout the MTA's system and he sent me the link to the directory of these installations. I spent an hour poking around and jumping from station to station, just looking for works I already know and love and earmarking works to find the next time I'm in the City. I came across an old favorite and I hadn't thought about it in years.

This is Canal Street.

Canal Street offers what I say is the most intense example of urban life that there is to be found in the US. It's impossible to walk down Canal Street and not get caught up in the crush of humanity and traffic and noise and the thrill of being alive in the center of the universe.

Now if you duck down this hole in the sidewalk at the corner of Canal Street and 6th Avenue, you'll come face to face with Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz's The Gathering from 2001.

The Gathering is a collection of 181 life-sized, bronze blackbirds, grackles and crows and they're integrated perfectly into the grates and gates of the station and platforms.

Canal Street's about as far as one can be removed from anything resembling a non-human life form and it's a pretty jarring surprise to run into 181 black birds in a subway station underneath the bedlam unfolding in the streets above. I love birds, I love New York and I love art. It's a grand slam. Thank you MTA.

The Gathering is the work of Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz and I wrote about them last August. Martin and Muñoz created a series of provocative snow globes I am still crazy about. Snow globes? Yes, snow globes. Follow the link and check check them out.

Anyhow, if you find yourself in New York and want to take an unconventional museum tour, buy a $2 Metro Card and cruise from station to station. The MTA's website makes plotting out such a tour easy.

Art is important, I'll go so far as to say that it's vital to the health of a society. Seeing the amount of time, money and attention the Metropolitan Transit Authority spends on public art should serve as an example to cities across the rest of the US. In a time of contracting economies and squeezed budgets, Art's still important. Maybe it's even more important now than ever.