trends

17 Oct 08

About Creative 30 - Creative 30

Want to look at this later. Interesting tension (imo) between being chosen to be profiled like this, vs just doing it (as 1000s of other "creatives" are). There are a number of people here (as anywhere) who would fit the bill to be profiled, but they don't live in London, so they're not. Now, does that mean you have to live in London (or: insert fave big / creative city)?, or can you be whiz-bang successful creative and live beyond the pale? Where is the pale these days? What,for that matter, is a pale, in the age of the internets?

www.creative30.net - Preview

creatives trends questions

18 Aug 08

New breed of 'net newsers' shape US media habits, says Pew report | Media | guardian.co.uk

Jemima Kiss writes about the recent Pew report that describes how "well-educated, technically-savvy young web users are shaping the media habits of the US, with one in 20 Americans saying they do not watch TV on a typical day and a sharp decline in newspaper readership, according to new research."

Interesting findings on education levels and TV-watching *and* interest (lack thereof) in science and technology, too.

www.guardian.co.uk/...digitalmedia.usa - Preview

newspapers television media news the_guardian jemima_kiss reference aggregators pew trends

A new generation of well-educated, technically-savvy young web users are shaping the media habits of the US, with one in 20 Americans saying they do not watch TV on a typical day and a sharp decline in newspaper readership, according to new research.
"net newsers" - web users under 35 who read more political blogs than watch national news coverage, rely heavily on web-based news during the day and have a strong interest in technology and technology news.
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- Net newsers are typically affluent and 80% are graduates, making them a highly desirable demographic for advertisers.
- They do favour some traditional media brands, including the New Yorker, The Atlantic and the BBC, the Pew survey of 3,600 adults found. But only 47% watch TV news on an average day.
- The research paints a picture of steady decline in the US newspaper industry, with the percentage of Americans who regularly read print titles falling from 58% in 1993 to 34% in 2008.
  According to the long-running survey, respondents saying they listened to radio news fell from 47% to 35% over the same period. As for network TV, the national news dropped from 60% to 29% and local news from 77% to 52%.
- However, TV is still the most popular medium for the US, with 46% of the public classified as "traditionalists" who watch throughout the day, but are likely to be older and less well educated than net newsers.
- More than 40% of this traditionalist group are unemployed, and were found to prefer visual news stories to audio and have little interest in science or technology news.
  A further 14% are described as "disengaged", a poorly-educated group with little interest in current affairs.
- The research also found that the proportion of young people in the US getting no daily news has increased from 25% in 1998 to 34%, with only 10% of people using social networking sites for their news.

05 Aug 08

Pattern Recognition: Latest Trends (July 08) | PSFK - Trends, Ideas & Inspiration

PSFK's round-up of trends (recent, 2008). Top of the heap in the list: lists, aka data (how to sort, how to represent, how to use); next, urbanism (varieties).

www.psfk.com/...ion-latest-trends-july-08.html - Preview

psfk trends 2008

in July 2008, we noticed three prevalent themes. The theme with the largest number of reference points interestingly enough revolved around data and information - the gathering, sorting and use of it. We also saw a number of stories about urban play and the greening of cities.
The second major theme we noticed in the posts was the idea of the city as a playground.

Protein® Feed | Could Globalization Be Going In Reverse?

"The world is flat" or "the world is spiky" or ..."the world is complex," maybe? At any rate, this article questions the idea that outsourcing will continue to continue, spreading outward in some sort of new and flattened topography (akin to a downward spiral insofar as the search for ever cheaper labor and laxer labor laws continues, but not wholly downward because economically, there's an upward trend associated with it, too - hence perhaps the "flat" topography). And it presents some interesting data as well as suppposition for why this might be so. It's not just the huge up-tick in transportation costs (although that's a key factor), it's also the logistics -- including "reverse logistics." For example, consumers *want* to do better, and are becoming more aware of the "carbon footprint" of the products they buy.

proteinos.com/...balization-be-going-in-reverse - Preview

globalization trends economic_development manufacturing transportation factories shipping

For the first time in recent decades, it seems there are now real reasons to question the logic underlying the official future of ever-increasing global trade.
The biggest, of course, is the rapidly mounting cost of transportation. As oil prices rise, reports the New York Times, shipping costs are driving decisions to shorten supply chains:
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- But transportation costs are not the only reasons why globalization as we know it might be in for some rapid evolution. Consider:
- *Far-flung supply chains may drop costs (even with higher oil prices), but the multiply climate change emissions. That already presents a marketing challenge as consumers grow more aware of their carbon footprints. And if political consensus emerges on pricing carbon (as seems likely), some of the price advantages of global complexity could vanish overnight.
- *Manufacturers and others are already increasingly aware of, and worried about, supply chain diversity. When the entire supply of a critical part or material comes from a distant factory or mine, every company that depends on that part or material is at risk. Increasingly, companies are trying to find multiple sources (and alternative sources), preferably close to home.
- *Some of the economic advantages of globalization have come from companies gaining the ability to skirt labor and environmental laws by doing business in countries with high levels of political corruption (corruption they have often helped create). But now, transparency activism has blown the cover of secrecy off these practices; now it is easier than ever to cause enormous brand damage simply by revealing an unsavory backstory.
- *Much of the logic of globalization assumes a one-way flow of materials, mined and grown in the poorest countries, manufactured into consumer goods in China, Brazil or Mexico, sold on the shelves of megastores in Europe or North America, then shipped away to the landfill. But as we move into zero waste and closed-loop systems (where there is no "away"), reverse logistics start to become a real concern. Producers become responsible for their products, meaning that running their current supply chains in reverse doubles (at least) their already mounting transportation costs. This alone could drive more local manufacturing.
- *Globalization suffers from some big disruptive vulnerabilities. An extreme act of terror, say a dirty bomb in a shipping container, could easily bring the whole system screeching to a halt. Ditto bird flu. Same with mass migrations triggered by environmental degradation and climate change in already desperately poor countries. Heck, even the right kind of invasive species scare could put a hiccup in the system, but some of these could stop trade altogether for quite some time.
- Especially in the developed world -- where we can draw on a huge basin of wealth and a huge capacity for innovation -- even a dramatic reversal in globalization would not fundamentally undermine our civilization (though it would certainly contribute to a number of real changes already underway, like greater urbanization, local food movements, cradle-to-cradle design and so on). We won't be headed back to de-industrialized farming any time soon.
- But if the scenario of a reversal in globalization in fact comes to pass, there will be some economic upheaval, and that upheaval will create winners and losers -- an effect that will be magnified if economic chaos occurs at the same time that the impacts of climate change begin to be felt in earnest. Some regions will plan ahead and do well. Others will suffer.
- One point is probably worth making in conclusion: because communications technologies are (comparatively speaking) dematerialized, a reversal in material trade patterns almost certainly would not also mean a reversal in intellectual trade patterns -- rising oil prices or climate change won't shut down the web or stop Bollywood from making movies or prevent innovators from licensing their ideas in other countries. In fact, it might be that expertise, innovation and culture will flow more freely in a world where goods flow more slowly. We might actually grow more interconnected in a world where supply chains shrank.
  - "...expertise, innovation and culture will flow more freely in a world where goods flow more slowly." = Interesting perspective/ idea, with implications for *location* (obviously)... - on 2008-08-05
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04 Aug 08

"Trading Places" by Alan Ehrenhalt (The New Republic)

Interesting article (which incidentally puts Vancouver front & centre), blogged by Richard Florida at Creative Class: the subtitle is "the demographic inversion of the American city." It's about how the "inner city" and its "inner city suburbs" are now desirable (and expensive) places to live, creating a 24/7 downtown (desired & theorized early on by Jane Jacobs, eg.), while the less affluent (ok, the poor!) are forced to live on the outskirts (suburbs). This used to be called "gentrification," but Ehrenhalt points out that it's a much more complex process than just that.

Haven't read all the comments to this article, but it starts with some excellent ones -- intelligent observations by readers.

www.tnr.com/...story.html - Preview

cities downtown creative_cities suburbs gentrification trends urbanization urban_renewal demographics

In the past three decades, Chicago has undergone changes that are routinely described as gentrification, but are in fact more complicated and more profound than the process that term suggests. A better description would be "demographic inversion." Chicago is gradually coming to resemble a traditional European city--Vienna or Paris in the nineteenth century, or, for that matter, Paris today. The poor and the newcomers are living on the outskirts. The people who live near the center--some of them black or Hispanic but most of them white--are those who can afford to do so.
Developments like this rarely occur in one city at a time, and indeed demographic inversion is taking place, albeit more slowly than in Chicago, in metropolitan areas throughout the country. The national press has paid very little attention to it. While we have been focusing on Baghdad and Kabul, our own cities have been changing right in front of us.
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- Before September 11, 2001, the number of people living in Manhattan south of the World Trade Center was estimated at about 25,000. Today, it is approaching 50,000. Close to one-quarter of these people are couples (nearly always wealthy couples) with children. The average household size is actually larger in lower Manhattan than in the city as a whole. It is not mere fantasy to imagine that in, say, 2020, the southern tip of Manhattan will be a residential neighborhood with a modest residual presence of financial corporations and financial services jobs. What's happening in Lower Manhattan isn't exactly an inversion in the Chicago sense: Expensive condos are replacing offices, not poor people. But it is dramatic demographic change nevertheless.
- If you want to see this sort of thing writ large, you can venture just across the Canadian border to Vancouver, a city roughly the size of Washington, D.C. What makes it unusual--indeed, at this point unique in all of North America--is that roughly 20 percent of its residents live within a couple of square miles of each other in the city's center. Downtown Vancouver is a forest of slender, green, condo skyscrapers, many of them with three-story townhouse units forming a kind of podium at the base. Each morning, there are nearly as many people commuting out of the center to jobs in the suburbs as there are commuting in. Two public elementary schools have opened in downtown Vancouver in the past few years. A large proportion of the city's 600,000 residents, especially those with money, want to live downtown.
- We are not witnessing the abandonment of the suburbs or a movement of millions of people back to the city all at once. But we are living at a moment in which the massive outward migration of the affluent that characterized the second half of the twentieth century is coming to an end. For several decades now, cities in the United States have wished for a "24/7" downtown, a place where people live as well as work, and keep the streets busy, interesting, and safe at all times of day. This is what urbanist Jane Jacobs preached in the 1960s, and it has long since become the accepted goal of urban planners. Only when significant numbers of people lived downtown, planners believed, could central cities regain their historic role as magnets for culture and as a source of identity and pride for the metropolitan areas they served. Now that's starting to happen, fueled by the changing mores of the young and by gasoline prices fast approaching $5-per-gallon. In many of its urbanized regions, an America that seemed destined for everincreasing individualization and sprawl is experimenting with new versions of community and sociability.

19 May 08

The Big Sort - Bill Bishop w/ Robert G. Cushing - Book Review by Scott Stossel - New York Times

Informative review of Bill Bishop's new book, The Big Sort. It's intriguing to juxtapose this to the Knute Berger article that discusses transumerism, which I also bookmarked today. It's almost as if two things are at work here: on the one hand, people "sorting" themselves demographically, and on the other, people circulating (and becoming a site of circulation), just like capital. The new physics of social data sets, with the transumers being a special case of relative sorting? :)

Also of course fascinating in Stossel's review/ Bishop's book are the observations on "the big sort"'s effect on politics, and that homogenous communities tend to be more cantakerous because they're so bloody convinced that they have it right, whereas heterogenous communities are forced into conversations with people of opposing views, which in turn informs all parties and makes "solutions" less "obvious," but also makes people more willing to compromise and/or put their shoulder to the wheel to keep things rolling in the right direction.

I personally believe that my hometown (Victoria BC) would benefit if more people here had more awareness of all the different things -- vocations, careers, lifestyles, EVERYTHING -- going on, instead of thinking that everyone else surely *must* think just as they do. You see this again and again when the question of urban development comes up: the same tired gang with the same tired cliches runs to the forefront, claims to represent the majority (which in a sense they do, as the majority is just as ignorant as the vocal gang), and bemoans all change coming to the city because they believe it "hurts" what they see as the primary economic engine here (tourism). They're totally unaware, it seems, that the high tech industry overtook tourism several years ago in terms of how much revenue it generates (something like $1.2b for tourism, and nearly $2b for high tech in Greater Victoria). This clinging to homogeneity (which is an illusion here: see the tech and the arts and the "different" communities

www.nytimes.com/...Stossel-t.html - Preview

big_sort demographics democracy trends bill_bishop

Superficially, the phenomenon Bishop is examining is not new, and the litany of division he recites is familiar. The two major political parties have become more extreme and can’t find common ground anymore. National civic groups and mainline church denominations have withered away, replaced by smaller, more narrowly focused independent groups. Marketers (and political pollsters) have sliced up the population into increasingly “microtargeted” segments. The three-network era of mass media, which helped create a national hearth of shared references and values, is long gone, displaced by a new media landscape that has splintered us into thousands of insular tribes. We can no longer even agree on what used to be called facts: Conservatives watch Fox; liberals watch MSNBC. Blogs and RSS feeds now make it easy to produce and inhabit a cultural universe tailored to fit your social values, your musical preferences, your view on every single political issue. We’re bowling alone — or at least only with people who resemble us, and agree with us, in nearly every conceivable way.
This separation into solipsistic blocs would perhaps not be so complete if people of different political views or cultural values at least lived within hailing distance, and encountered one another on the street or in the store from time to time. But, increasingly, they don’t. Over the last decade, as 100 million Americans have moved from one place to another, they’ve clustered in increasingly homogeneous communities. This is where “The Big Sort,” which grew out of a series of articles that Bishop, formerly a reporter at The Austin American-Statesman, wrote with Robert Cushing, a retired sociologist and statistician from the University of Texas, is both wonkiest and most original.
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- “By the turn of the 21st century, it seemed as though the country was separating in every way conceivable.”
- American migration is now inspired at least as much by “lifestyle” choices as by economics. “We have built a country,” Bishop writes, “where everyone can choose the neighbors (and church and news shows) most compatible with his or her lifestyle and beliefs. And we are living with the consequences of this segregation by way of life: pockets of like-minded citizens that have become so ideologically inbred that we don’t know, can’t understand, and can barely conceive of ‘those people’ who live just a few miles away.”
  - Substitute "city" for "country," and you're close to describing Victoria, where ideological inbreeding is in some groups so advanced that its members can't understand "'those people' who live just a few miles away" [i.e., in Vancouver]. Instead, it's all about how "we don't want to be 'just' another Vancouver." That's sorting at work, right here. It's great that Bishop et al. call that into question; here (in Victoria), it's taken as a good thing: that we're "different" from them, etc., but if you look at the whole picture, is it a good thing? Not when it thwarts the city's economy. - on 2008-05-19
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- Bishop argues that this clustering of like with like accelerated in the tumult of the 1960s when, unmoored from the organizations and traditions that had guided their choices about how to live, Americans grew anxious and disoriented — and reflexively sought comfort in the familiar, cocooning themselves in communities of people like themselves. This sorting was compounded in the 1980s and ’90s as the clustering of educated people in certain cities produced regional wage disparities — which in turn attracted more-highly educated people to the richer cities, which in turn accentuated the economic disparities between cities, creating a cycle of division that shows little sign of relenting.
- Does this balkanization matter? Bishop argues convincingly that it does. Psychological studies suggest that the mere fact of division, even when there is no substantive content to it, can be corrosive: in a series of experiments in the 1950s and ’60s, groups of similar people arbitrarily divided into subgroups quickly exploded into conflicts of “Lord of the Flies”-like intensity. Other studies have shown that when relatively like-minded people are grouped together, they don’t settle around the average point of view of the individuals in the group but rather become more extreme in the direction toward which they’re already inclined. This gives clustering a powerful self-reinforcing quality, and helps explain how American counties have hardened into such immovable political clumps. “It doesn’t seem to matter if you’re a frat boy, a French high school student, a petty criminal or a federal appeals court judge,” Bishop writes. “Mixed company moderates; like-minded company polarizes. Heterogeneous communities restrain group excesses; homogeneous communities march toward the extremes.”
- The founding fathers didn’t need social psychology experiments to understand that homogeneity could be dangerous. In their wisdom, they created a system of government that called for constant conversation and compromise among competing interests — what Alexander Hamilton called the “jarring of parties.”

15 May 08

At The Churchill Club: The Top 10 Tech Trends (Tech Trader Daily - Barron’s Online)

An article by Eric Savitz that sums up the panel presentation by Steve Jurvetson, Vinod Khosla, Josh Kopelman, Roger McNamee, Joe Schoendorf, and Tony Perkins on the top 10 tech trends to be aware of. Lots of buzz around mobile phone technology, mobile computing in the manner of what The Economist called "Nomads at last" (see http://tinyurl.com/643een) "who are defined not by what they carry but by what they leave behind, knowing that the environment will provide it."

Speaking of modeling the new urban connected classes on nomads (and Bedouins), another trend identified by the panel was that water is the next peak oil. See Wired Magazine, Peak Water (http://tinyurl.com/5kzqcv).

Jurvetson talked about how "evolution trumps design," which seemed to me like he is channeling Janine Benyus and Lynn Margulis. Microbes are drivers of evolutionary biomass viability on Planet Gaia; we're part of that game; and we will figure out how to engineer matter at the nano level of microbial life to "hack" evolution's code and make those organisms work for us. Dangerous, but inevitable. (As Margulis and Dorian Sagan point out, however, if Gaia is a living thing and if living things are defined by having the ability to reproduce, then our role on earth may well be to help Gaia reproduce: i.e., create viable biospheres that can be sent away from Earth into space. What better place to fulfil that mandate than to tinker with microbes and evolution?)

blogs.barrons.com/...ll-club-the-top-10-tech-trends - Preview

trends technology futurismo

Services online will exceed market for goods online.
The mobile phone will be a mainstream personal computer.
- Yup. Again, see "Nomads at last" in The Economist. - on 2008-05-15
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- Trend is that big wave will come to companies that are able to novel and new ways to deliver information by crossing these silos, with implicit data on the Internet. Use social networking data to improve search. Conversion of data exhaust will create value in new and interesting ways. All of the panelists seem to agree that this is a key trend. McNamee says he hopes Kopelman is not right, given the privacy concerns that are involved. The issue is providing implied consent to follow the bread crumbs, McNamee says. Schoendorf says this is an under 25 issue. McNamee notes that the trouble is that not only does Facebook know what I’m doing, but the Chinese government also knows. Khosla says it is an opportunity, not a problem. “Privacy is a red herring,” Khosla says. “There are rules and laws and ways to address the privacy issue.” Data reduction is an important need, Khosla says. He has a secretary to do it. Khosla says it is a critical need and huge opportunity.
- Water tech will replace global warming as a global priority.
- In 25-30 years, will be rarer commodity than oil, and more valuable. Khosla says he is invested in two water companies, and looking for more. Schoendorf notes that T. Boone Pickens is selling oil companies and buying water companies.
- 6. Jurvetson: Evolution trumps design. Many interesting unsolved problems in computer science, nanotech, and synthetic biology require construction of complex systems. Evolutionary algorithms are a powerful alternative to traditional design, blossoming first in neural networks and now in microbial engineering. Near-term trend: year or two, components of microbial engineering products will involve some form of evolution. Design for evolution. Has been used in neural networks. In microbial work, cripple a microbe, so it can do the one thing it does better and better. To make industrial chemicals. Applied to analog circuit design.
- 7. Khosla: Fossilizing fossil energy. Oil and coal will have trouble competing with biofuels. 99% of discussion on the topic is completely irrelevant to the topic. In 4-5 years will have production proof that can sell biofuel at well below $2 a gallon at today’s tax structure and no subsidy. Can’t imagine how big oil can stay in business if that is an alternative. Zero land needed to replace 100% of our gasoline.
- 9. McNamee: Within 5 years, everything that matters to you will be available to you on a device that fits on your belt or in your purse. Massive shift in Internet traffic from PCs to smaller devices. You should all get a Kindle, and study this thing, Roger says. Apple has it in the long run, wrong. Won’t be about watching created content, it will be about creating content. Within 10 years, more Internet traffic from your person than all other locations put together.
- 10. Schoendorf: 80% of the world population will carry mobile Internet devices within 5-10 years. Dial-tone is going to be gone. By next year, people will put micro cells in your house. China Mobile has 500 million billable lines. Within 5-10 years will hit 5 billion global wireless phones. Jurvetson thinks 80% is simply too high; he noes that a quarter of the world’s population has no electricity. They will concentrate in the richest nations, Jurvetson says.

26 Feb 08

FREE LOVE

Available as a 15-page printable PDF, too, this is the website version. From the intro:
"FREE LOVE: the ongoing rise of free, valuable stuff that's available to consumers online and offline. From AirAsia tickets to Wikipedia, and from diapers to music.
FREE LOVE thrives on an all-out war for consumers' ever-scarcer attention and the resulting new business models and marketing techniques, but also benefits from the ever-decreasing costs of producing physical goods, the post-scarcity dynamics of the online world (and the related avalanche of free content created by attention-hungry members of GENERATION C), the many C2C marketplaces enabling consumers to swap instead of spend, and an emerging recycling culture.
Expect FREE LOVE to become an integral if not essential part of doing business."

trendwatching.com/briefing - Preview

free marketing trends trendwatch

So let's look at five manifestations of FREE LOVE: 'Any excuse to advertise', 'Courting saturated consumers', 'C2C', 'Swapping, not spending', and 'Less is more', which all incorporate one or more of the above drivers.
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- Student textbooks • U.S.-based Freeload Press provides free college textbooks in electronic form with advertisements inserted at chapter breaks. Inexpensive print-on-demand versions with no ads can be ordered for about USD 30. 'Customers' include students at four-year and two-year colleges throughout the U.S. and Canada. Freeload publishes primarily business and finance books. Students who register and complete a survey on Freeload's website can download a free PDF version of their textbook. Advertisers include Discover Card, PricewaterhouseCoopers and the College Loan Corporation.
  
  In Europe, Danish Ventus Publishing runs a similar concept in 5 countries: (Denmark, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium). Ventus offers titles in the fields of economics, science and engineering, featuring ads from companies such as T-Mobile, British Airways and Deutsche Bank every four pages.
- Finance • Free software may be nothing new, but sophisticated personal finance/money management tools had until now eluded the FREE LOVE dance. Enter Mint, which has relationships with more than 3,500 banks, credit unions and credit card providers, and each night securely downloads transaction data to give users a unified view of all account activity. Transactions are categorized and organized to show users how much they spend on gas, groceries, parking, rent, restaurants, DVD rentals, etc., while an alert system proactively notifies them about unusual activity, low balances, unwanted fees and charges, and upcoming bills. Mint's revenue model is based on lead generation. The system keeps tabs on the latest offers from hundreds of providers and recommends ways users can save money on interest rates and other expenses. Mint is currently available only to U.S. consumers, of whom more than 100,000 have already signed up. The company claims it is now organizing USD 6 billion in user transactions, and has identified nearly USD 90 million in savings opportunities.
- Also check out Wesabe, which is part financial software, part community. With Wesabe, users can see all their bank accounts and credit cards in one place, categorize their transactions however they want, see spending and earning summaries, discuss things with other interested users, and receive tips for saving money based on their spending. Membership is free.
- If giving is the new taking, then hundreds of thousands consumers/individuals are on the right path. Never before have we witnessed such an explosion of free content, courtesy of individuals who—for free, nada, zilch—are happy to share their thinking, their novels, their photos, their movies, their music, their knowledge and expertise, their advice, their crafts and more.
  
  Call it GENERATION C, the HOBBY ECONOMY, the GIFT ECONOMY or CROWD MINING, as long as you don't forget that besides undeniable passion, this user-generated FREE LOVE provides participants with visibility, with respect, with status. Even if they participate anonymously (Wikipedia is a good example), it gives them bragging rights among other GENERATION C members.
  
  Now, we’ve written and spoken about participation vs consumption so often that we won’t repeat the whole spiel, but two more thoughts:
  
  Firstly, nothing indicates that user-generated content, both of the paid and the free kind, and in all its variety, is not here to stay.
  
  Secondly, if many consumers are now producers too, and if they mostly produce for free, will they not expect a similar sharing and loving attitude from corporations? So as a brand, not only may you find yourself competing directly with individuals doing what you do for free, but you will also be confronted with growing expectations for your brand to be giving rather than just taking.
- Now, FREE LOVE is not about everything being free in the (near) future. After all, not everything commercial can be ad-sponsored (if only because those ads in the end have to sell something else), not everything will be copyable, and not everything that's non-commercial can replace the for-profit business world. In fact, scarcity can and will forever be redefined, creating an endless stream of new products and services that many consumers will be happy to pay for. For some instant inspiration on what may in fact be better than free, (re)read Kevin Kelly's excellent 8 Uncopyable Values.

08 Jan 08

Arts study a culture shock (Toronto Star)

I read something about this study last week, can't recall where, and generally think it's a bit silly anyway. But what catches my attention in this Toronto Star article by Peter Goddard is how it brings out that visual art is currently at the very bottom of the totem pole. I see that in my own habits, too, and wonder why it's so. Is it because too much of the art being produced is uninteresting?, can't compete with other media or arts (like theatre, music, etc.)? Has visual art become somehow irrelevant, and if so, when did this happen and why? Does it have to do with time, with speed? Or simply relevance -- and format?

www.thestar.com/...290794 - Preview

arts cultural_support culture popular_opinion socialtheory studies surveys trends

Forget class versus trash, the elite versus the masses.
Divide culture consumers into four new groups, says an international study Oxford University researchers released late last month that will have far-reaching results for arts support everywhere.
"Univores," "Omnivores," "Paucivores" and "Inactives" are the new categories we can all find ourselves in. Which one depends on whether we believe Britney is a huge tabloid star or an area in northwestern France where Impressionist painters spent their summers.
But no matter what group is discussed, the visual arts do not figure very high on anyone's to-do list.
"When it comes to the visual arts, you find there's a sizeable part of the adult population that doesn't participate at all."
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- "Univores," the largest of the four groups, consume great quantities of pop culture – TV, pop music and Hollywood flicks – and little else. "But there are no truly popular forms in the visual arts that have as wide a media exposure as does pop music," says Goldthorpe. Tak Wing Chan was his colleague in the study for the Economic and Social Research Council in England.
- "Omnivores," the next biggest group, includes people who go to the ballet, symphony or opera on occasion while still buying lots of pop culture.
  For purposes of the study, cultural consumption was split into three basic categories: theatre, dance and the movies; music of all sorts; and the visual arts.
- Only "Paucivores," a decidedly small group, may be found at a blockbuster museum opening. But that's about the extent of it. Paucivores don't care much for contemporary art.
- The "Inactives," are the Goldthorpe-Chan version of couch potatoes, hunkered down in front of the television day and night. They're found in every culture. Along with the U.K., data was assembled in France, the Netherlands, Hungary, Israel, Chile and the United States and analyzed by 13 researchers.
- In England, the report has caused something of a stir because it blew holes in the idea of an upper class forming a cultural elite.
- "We are unable to identify any numerically significant group of cultural consumers whose consumption is essentially confined to high cultural forms and who reject, or at least do not participate in, more popular forms," says the report.
  Status counts, not class. And status is defined by income not by culture.
  In short, the very idea of "pop culture" is a misnomer.
  There is no pop culture. Pop is culture.
- "Status is now attached to material consumption, not cultural consumption," Goldthorpe tells me. "People with status show who they are though expensive cars and houses rather than by going to museums and the like."
  Indeed, the report itself hammers home the blunt truth that "income has no effect on determining" the kind of culture being consumed. The bottom line? People who could help symphonies survive or back the arts don't want to.
  They are "self-excluded," says the report, "rather than socially excluded."
  - - sounds grim (for arts).... - on 2008-01-08
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- Better education does little to change this bleak picture. "There is a sizeable number of people in this group who don't participate" in the elite arts, Goldthorpe says
  Why?
  "The short answer is, I don't know," says Goldthorpe.
- Unfortunately, the Chan-Goldthorpe report will play into the hands of reactionary politicians who question whether the arts should be funded at all, since no one gives a hoot about them.
  Already the Labour government in Britain is showing signs of cutting back its cultural support as a way of funneling money to "the demands of the Olympic Games," Goldthorpe says.
  - - yes, the old libertarian argument, in action again... - on 2008-01-08
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31 Dec 07

Sybil Wa: Architect (Toronto Star)

- interesting article about a young architect who talks the talk and walks the walk: she works on highrises and downtown buildings, and lives d/t in a highrise with her young daughters and husband (families *can* live in condos d/t).

www.thestar.com/...289579 - Preview

architect christopher_hume profile sybil_wa trends

The mother of two young daughters, Mei, 5, and Clara, 2, Wa was also attracted to Montgomery Sisam because of the possibility of flexible work hours. "I'm the primary caregiver," she says. "But I want to do interesting work."
It helps that Wa and her husband, financial analyst Adam Parkin, are also committed to living downtown, close to work; they are among the small but growing number of families that make their homes in highrise condos.
"There are more families in our building than ever," she reports. "I founded a Parent Network in my building when my first daughter was born. We share a car with my husband's family."
Wa feels fortunate to be in a profession that can actually do something about the quality of city life and the public realm. She also serves on the Regent Park Revitalization Design Review Panel and was part of a symposium about high-density living organized recently by the city planning department.
"Architects have participated in the creation of a lot of our problems," she declares. "But now we're starting to think about the quality of the street. I think it's important to be optimistic."

27 Dec 07

The world goes to town | Economist.com

- article published in May 2007; "After this year the majority of people will live in cities. Human history will ever more emphatically become urban history, says John Grimond." Rural contribution to human progress has been slight compared to urban contributions.

economist.com/...displayStory.cfm - Preview

cities john_grimond megacities the_economist trends urbanization

the rural contribution to human progress seems slight compared with the urban one. Cities' development is synonymous with human development. The first villages came with the emergence of agriculture and the domestication of animals: people no longer had to wander as they hunted and gathered but could instead draw together in settlements, allowing some to develop particular skills and all to live in greater safety from predators. After a while the farmers could produce surpluses, at least in good times, and the various products of the villagers—grain, meat, cloth, pots—could be exchanged. Around 2000BC metal tokens, the forerunners of coins, were produced as receipts for quantities of grain placed in granaries. Not coincidentally, cities began to take shape at about the same time.
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- But bread, in the broadest sense, was important. People came to cities not just to worship but to trade—the shrine was often the market, too—and the goods they bought and sold were not just farm products but the manufactures of urban artisans and skilled workers. The city became a centre of exchange, both of goods and of ideas, and so it also became a centre of learning, innovation and sophistication.
- Whatever the particular circumstances of a city, though, its vigour was likely to be affected by technological change. Just as it was improvements in farming that brought about the surpluses that made possible the first fixed settlements, so it was improvements in transport that made possible the development of trade on which the prosperity of so many cities depended. Other technological changes made it possible to survive in a city. The Romans, for instance, constructed aqueducts to bring fresh water to their towns and sewers to provide sanitation.
- But only the rich benefited. Most Romans, and many city-dwellers throughout history, lived in squalor, and many died of it. Towns were crowded and insanitary; people were often malnourished; and disease spread fast. Though cities grew in size and number for long periods, they could decline and fall, too. Between 1000 and 1300 Europe's urban population more than doubled, to about 70m (thanks partly to a new system of crop rotation, made possible by better tools). Then, with the Black Death, it fell by a quarter. Country people died too, but the city-dwellers were especially vulnerable. Their health depended above all on clean water and sanitation, which few had, and cheap soap and medicines, which had yet to be invented.
- Not surprisingly, the next big change in the development of the city also turned on a leap in technology: the invention of engines and manufacturing machinery. The Industrial Revolution did nothing at first to make urban life easier, but it did provide jobs—lots of them. With the new factories of the industrial age that began in the late 18th century was born an entirely new urban era. Peasants left the land in their multitudes to live in new cities, first in the north of England, then all over Europe and North America. By 1900, 13% of the world's population had become urban.
  
  The latest leap, from 13% to 50% in just 107 years, also owes something to science and technology: improvements in medicine, coupled with new knowledge about ways to avoid disease, have enabled more and more people to live together without succumbing as once they did to diarrhoea, tuberculosis, cholera and other pestilences. The same developments, however, have similarly lengthened lives in the countryside, leading to a huge increase in rural population. Human ingenuity has not matched this increase with commensurate growth in rural prosperity. As a result, ever more villagers have been upping sticks to seek a better life in the city.
- The sheer scale and speed of the current urban expansion make it unlike any of the big changes that have punctuated urban history. It mostly consists of poor people migrating in unprecedented numbers, and then producing babies on a similarly unprecedented scale. It is thus largely a phenomenon of poor and middle-income countries; the rich world has put most of its urbanisation behind it.
- Greater Tokyo already has 35m, more than the entire population of Canada.
- In the rich world, though, the city is undergoing very different changes. Many of the new towns that flourished in the Industrial Revolution and the manufacturing era that followed have been losing population. Even New York, for so long the epitome of urban sophistication, went through a bad patch in the 1970s. Some cities retain their role as administrative centres, by virtue of their political status. Some are still trading hubs, by virtue of their geographical position. Some endure simply because they have reached an equilibrium. But others struggle.
  
  Of the traditional reasons for urban living, several (the presence of the shrine, the proximity of food) have lost their importance. Some of what the city provided (shops, factories) can now be offered in suburban malls or industrial parks—or in low-cost urban rivals in the developing world. Security, once one of the main reasons for huddling together, is often now more elusive in the druggy streets of the metropolis than in the exurbs. And technology, which has usually favoured urban progress, now enables people to work in rural bliss on home computers. No wonder so many cities find that in order to flourish they have to reinvent themselves.

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