Yule Heibel's Library tagged socialcritique →  View Popular, Search in Google

Yep.
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In recent months, Dr. Jackson has released another scholarly book, an edited collection on the topic, called Making Healthy Places: Designing and Building for Wealth, Well-Being, and Sustainability (Island Press), and he is also the host of a four-part miniseries called Designing Healthy Communities, which will air on public television starting this week. The series, which features a companion book, is clearly meant to sway public opinion.

"If we are going to change the way we build our communities, it has got to be done because of the demand of the citizenry—a demand that the average, very busy local political leader can understand," Dr. Jackson says. "We humans are so adaptable that we look at the world that we are in and we think, It has to be this way. But everything around us was an idea in someone's head before it was built. In large part, the idea behind the series is to alter what's in our head."
(...)
In the mainstream media, the work of Dr. Jackson and researchers with similar interests has been pithily condensed to a variation of this eye-grabbing headline: "Suburbia Makes You Fat." But his focus in Designing Healthy Communities is actually broader than that, with as much emphasis on our need for social connection and beauty as on our need for physical activity. (...)

The series also laments the loss of a social contract in America, looking at places like Detroit, Syracuse, and Oakland, Calif., where crushing poverty or pollution have hampered or even dissolved once-thriving communities. (...)

He also challenges the free-market, individualist ideology that has become popular in recent years. Communities and public health are things we build together, with the help of good planning and effective government, Dr. Jackson contends—even as companies that sell junk food, oil, cars, and sprawl pump money into politics and advertising to try to push society in the other direction.

"The fundamental paradigm that nobody else matters but me is making us fundamentally unhealthy and unhappy," he says. "This is a myth that has been foisted upon us by those that profit from this belief system."
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richard_jackson chronicle_of_higher_education sprawl cities urbanism socialtheory socialcritique

Another examination of whether/ how the internet is scattering our focus. And then there's Eytan Kobre's response to this question, "It's also that you're dressing the same way your 18th century ancestors did, which implies that you're rejecting the modern world":
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There may be elements of truth to that. But the irony is that hipsters all dress a certain way, and the whole point is to dress entirely different from everyone else. Orthodox Jews actually have the courage to dress the same way as 500,000 of their brethren. They're the ones who challenge people by asking, "Are you deep enough to look beyond my garb and relate to me as a thinking individual?" In contrast, the hipster buys into the most external of indicators: that which is immediately apparent to the eye.
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eytan_kobre atlantic_monthly internet socialcritique

Interesting Jan.2012 op-ed by Jeff Jahn in the Portland Tribune. Jahn is an independent curator and critic.
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Since the mid-’90s, artists and designers have emigrated to or stayed in Portland for very specific and often moral reasons. In a nutshell, it is because Portland is the first U.S. city to grow out of the adolescent attitudes of America in the second half of the 20th century. The laundry list: non-car-reliant transportation, green thinking, proximity to nature, a very non-1 percent-centric civic attitude, high-tech savvy and a permissive attitude that was essentially humanistic rather than purely capitalistic.

In other words, the original Occupy Portland started around the mid-’90s by artists and has only gathered steam since. Think of artists as canaries in the coal mine of civilization — it is a tough job, but it’s very important to watch what they do. Artists bring immense cultural cache, even jobs. Ultimately, they redirect our attention, giving us a new aesthetic and conceptual compass. Then they export those ideas in distilled, compact creative endeavors.

No city owns its artists, but a city can choose to (either) support or take its artists for granted.

To be overly simplistic, Portland became a 21st-century leader because it rejected both of the 20th century’s main models: Manhattan’s top-down corporate verticality and LA’s car-driven suburban sprawl. Instead, as a more 19th century-style city of shopkeepers and artists (defined by our citizens more than institutions), we should own the title and take care to not become complacent.
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portland jeff_jahn artculture socialcritique

Great insights from Adam Gopnik. Loved these passages, near the end of the article, especially regarding a technology's descent from omnipresence to ...just something:
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Now television [once the object of jeremiads about the disintegration of modern life] is the harmless little fireplace over in the corner, where the family gathers to watch “Entourage.” TV isn’t just docile; it’s positively benevolent. This makes you think that what made television so evil back when it was evil was not its essence but its omnipresence. Once it is not everything, it can be merely something. The real demon in the machine is the tirelessness of the user. A meatless Monday has advantages over enforced vegetarianism, because it helps release the pressure on the food system without making undue demands on the eaters. In the same way, an unplugged Sunday is a better idea than turning off the Internet completely, since it demonstrates that we can get along just fine without the screens, if only for a day.
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And: "Thoughts are bigger than the things that deliver them." Truer words (etc etc)...

adam_gopnik newyorker internet socialcritique

Illuminating article on how the phrase "one nation under God" snuck its way back onto dollars...

Atheism looks better every day... I mean, "Christian Libertarianism"? The implied concept of submission reminds me of *other* religious fundamentalisms, none of which are any good.
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Christianity, in Mr. Fifield’s interpretation, closely resembled capitalism, as both were systems in which individuals rose or fell on their own. The welfare state, meanwhile, violated most of the Ten Commandments. It made a “false idol” of the federal government, encouraged Americans to covet their neighbors’ possessions, stole from the wealthy and, ultimately, bore false witness by promising what it could never deliver.

Throughout the 1930s and ’40s, Mr. Fifield and his allies advanced a new blend of conservative religion, economics and politics that one observer aptly anointed “Christian libertarianism.”
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nyt socialcritique kevin_kruse religion libertarianism

Interesting: a crit of the web akin to Jane Jacobs's 1961 book?
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What the internet badly needed in its first two decades of existence, and what it needs still, is a book akin to Jane Jacob’s [sic] 1961 The Death and Life of Great American Cities which attacked the practices and attitudes of 1950s US urban planners and proved hugely influential. The structure of online space requires a similar critique.

The founding fathers of the internet had laudable instincts: the utopian vision of the internet as a shared space to maximise communal welfare is a good template to work from. But they got co-opted by big money, and became trapped in the self-empowerment discourse that was just an ideological ruse to conceal the interests of big companies and minimise government intervention.

The current state of affairs is not irreversible. We still have some privacy left and internet companies can still be swayed by smart regulation. But we need to stop thinking of the internet as a marketplace first and a public forum second. What is long overdue is a fundamental reconsideration of the primacy of the internet’s civic and aesthetic dimensions. It’s time to decide whether we want the internet to look like a private mall or a public square.
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prospect_magazine evgeny_morozov jjacobs internet socialcritique

Hear, hear:
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Carr’s chief problem, though, is a tendency to view every social problem he encounters as either caused by the internet or heavily influenced by it. He worries about the emergence of the post-literary mind; the fact that few people have time for novels like War and Peace; the lack of time and space for contemplative thought; and even a “slow erosion of our humanness and our humanity,” not to mention his constant fretting about the future of western civilisation held hostage by the ephemeral tweets of movie star Ashton Kutcher. There is cause for concern here, but most of these problems pre-date the internet. Similarly, Carr’s sections on the novel provide a conservative defence of linear narrative, stable truths, and highly-structured, rational discourse. Yet all of this came under severe assault from postmodernism long before Google’s founders entered high school.
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prospect_magazine evgeny_morozov nicholas_carr internet socialcritique

Evgeny Morozov notes that public outrage over rioters might be playing right into the hands of repressive regimes only too eager to tighten social media controls in their own countries...
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In their concern to stop not just mob violence but commercial crimes like piracy and file-sharing, Western politicians have proposed new tools for examining Web traffic and changes in the basic architecture of the Internet to simplify surveillance. What they fail to see is that such measures can also affect the fate of dissidents in places like China and Iran. Likewise, how European politicians handle online anonymity will influence the policies of sites like Facebook, which, in turn, will affect the political behavior of those who use social media in the Middle East.
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socialtheory socialmedia riots evgeny_morozov socialcritique facebook

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We find ourselves at a point in the world where the main tool to measure economic success and progress — Gross Domestic Product, or GDP – is outdated. Do we need a new set of rules for our economy to effectively begin to measure real, productive growth? Umair Haque, author of “The New Capitalist Manifesto” and director of the Havas Media Lab, believes it’s critical to the future of our country and our global economy.
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Includes audio/ interview.

audiocasts interview umair_haque capitalism economy socialcritique dylan_ratigan

It's very interesting when you fall into one end of this demographic, ...while your own children fall into the other. Interesting times...
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Students now finishing their schooling--the class of 2011--are confronting a youth unemployment rate above 17 percent. The problem is compounding itself as those collecting high school or college degrees jostle for jobs with recent graduates still lacking steady work. "The biggest problem they face is, they are still competing with the class of 2010, 2009, and 2008," says Matthew Segal, cofounder of Our Time, an advocacy group for young people.

At the other end, millions of graying baby boomers--the class of 1967--are working longer than they intended because the financial meltdown vaporized the value of their homes and 401(k) plans. For every member of the millennial generation frustrated that she can't start a career, there may be a baby boomer frustrated that he can't end one.
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atlantic_monthly workforce unemployment socialcritique

Umair Haque on Eudaimonia:
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...here's what I believe it [current economy] might just be called tomorrow, when the history books have been written, and the debates concluded: a Eudaimonic Revolution. A sweeping, historic transformation in what we imagine a good life to be, and how, why, where, and when we pursue it.

(...) Eudaimonic prosperity, in contrast, is about mastering a new set of habits: igniting the art of living meaningfully well. An active conception of prosperity, it's concerned not with what one has, but what one is capable of.
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Living, not just having; Better, not just more; Becoming, not just being; Creating and building, not just trading and raiding; Depth, not just immediacy

umair_haque eudaimonia socialcritique

I like this post by Sam Ladner. I find that the points she makes mesh nicely with the critiques lobbed at The Social Network (the movie), and the inability of Sorkin's take to understand the social transformations that have taken place (and the many more that will take place) via social media platforms.
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He [Gladwell] makes the classic mistake of arguing that a particular technology may (or may not) lead to a particular result. In the real, messy, social world, X technology is not guaranteed to lead to Y results. Nor is X technology guaranteed NOT to lead to Y results. Gladwell commits the same sin as those of social media pundits he so blithely condemns. Namely, Gladwell is a technological determinist with a poor grasp of actual social interaction.

Sociologists, by contrast, recognize the social world is complex and full of exceptions. Their contribution to the phenomena of social change is far more nuanced than Gladwell suggets.
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malcolm_gladwell sam_ladner socialmedia socialjustice socialcritique social_capital facebook

I've been saying something similar to this for YEARS, even going so far as to say that it's morally irresponsible to continue cranking out PhDs, especially humanities PhDs, for whom there are NO jobs, and to fail to prepare them for careers outside academia (when I was getting my PhD, my advisors' attitude was that working outside of academia was basically akin to failure and/or selling one's body by the roadside, i.e., totally unacceptable. It would have been more helpful to show us how to figure out non-academic careers instead. As a result, I really rather despise my fat-stupid-happy (read: tenured) former advisors. They made it on *my* back (and many other backs just like mine).

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The labor system, for one thing, is clearly unjust. Tenured and tenure-track professors earn most of the money and benefits, but they're a minority at the top of a pyramid. Nearly two-thirds of all college teachers are non-tenure-track adjuncts like Matt Williams, who told Hacker and Dreifus he had taught a dozen courses at two colleges in the Akron area the previous year, earning the equivalent of about $8.50 an hour by his reckoning. It is foolish that graduate programs are pumping new Ph.D.'s into a world without decent jobs for them. If some programs were phased out, teaching loads might be raised for some on the tenure track, to the benefit of undergraduate education.
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nyt tenure academia socialcritique

Male bias is alive and well, even in the NYT obituary...
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But as the gold standard of American journalism, it should fall to the NYT to aggressively find and chronicle the lives of women who deserve attention in the obituary column right now -- women whose rich lives and notable achievements warrant the honor of recognition when they die.
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nyt obituaries feminism sexism gender socialcritique NYTpicker

Interesting observations. Heavy users are ~1% of online participants (90% lurk, 9% comment occasionally, 1% comment heavily and shape the community). Re. anonymity, see also the Shirky article in The Guardian, and consider this observation in Boston.com:
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Almost all the heavy users I spoke with said they would continue to comment even if they had to provide their real name.
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And how easy is it to uncover anonymity? Very.
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While news organizations debate scrapping anonymity, the ground may be shifting beneath them. With all of our identifying information getting sliced, diced, and sold, by everyone from credit card companies to Facebook, is there really such a thing as the anonymous Web anymore? Consider this demonstration from the late ’90s by Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor Latanya Sweeney. She took three commonly available data points: sex (male), ZIP code (02138), and date of birth (July 31, 1945). Those seemingly anonymous attributes could have described lots of people, right? Actually, no. She proved they could belong to just one person: former governor William Weld. She tells me that 87 percent of Americans can now be identified with just these three data points.
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boston_globe online_commenting anonymity internet socialtheory socialcritique

Clay Shirky defends the web, has a couple of insights into the nature of nasty anonymous commenting, too, which really make a lot of sense. I like his "islands of civility" notion. And here's my favorite bit:
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"The final thing I'd say about optimism is this. If we took the loopiest, most moonbeam-addled Californian utopian internet bullshit, and held it up against the most cynical, realpolitik-inflected scepticism, the Californian bullshit would still be a better predictor of the future. Which is to say that, if in 1994 you'd wanted to understand what our lives would be like right now, you'd still be better off reading a single copy of Wired magazine published in that year than all of the sceptical literature published ever since."
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clay_shirky internet socialcritique socialtheory

"...rough unedited crib of the actual talk" delivered by Danah Boyd at March 2010 SXSW conference.
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Fundamentally, privacy is about having control over how information flows. It's about being able to understand the social setting in order to behave appropriately. To do so, people must trust their interpretation of the context, including the people in the room and the architecture that defines the setting. When they feel as though control has been taken away from them or when they lack the control they need to do the right thing, they scream privacy foul.
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privacy danah_boyd socialcritique

Sharon Zukin takes on gentrification (in Harlem especially), while Harlem-ites dismiss her critique. "Gentrification" v. "authenticity" - which one is better?

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It should also be said that these talented, innovative African-Americans are forging a new entrepreneurial path that was too often closed to their ancestors. Jai Jai Greenfield, co-owner of Harlem Vintage, a wine store that opened on Frederick Douglass Boulevard in 2004, designed it as an homage to her grandparents, longtime Harlem residents whose elegant photographs from the 1930s were featured in the store's initial promotional literature. She says that Ms. Zukin is missing the point. "We brought to Harlem something that had never existed here—a store that is for and about the wine. [Ms. Zukin] seems to think that to be legitimately ghetto our store should look a certain way—bullet-proofed windows and grates. To be authentic, in her view, I would need to go with a couple of concepts—fried chicken or maybe a nail salon."
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authenticity gentrification sharon_zukin harlem nyc socialcritique

Rob blogged about Amsterdam's re-think of its liberal laws regarding drug use (and prostitution, too). I left a *long* comment, a thinking-out-loud about how the factory system of education, coupled with a repression of creative risk-taking and innovation in the culture, enables and exacerbates turning to drugs.

robert_randall drugs socialcritique drug_addiction education innovation risk youth comments

Yes, he's an old curmudgeon, but there are valid questions and true insights in this piece, which among other things basically asks, whatever happened to self-control and isn't there something plain wrong with thinking that it's now imperative to let it all hang out all the time.
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Certainly, many Britons under the age of 30 or even 40 now embrace a kind of sub-psychotherapeutic theory that desires, if not unleashed, will fester within and eventually manifest themselves in dangerous ways. To control oneself for the sake of the social order, let alone for dignity or decorum (a word that would either mean nothing to the British these days, or provoke peals of laughter), is thus both personally and socially harmful.

I have spoken with young British people who regularly drink themselves into oblivion, passing first through a prolonged phase of public nuisance. To a man (and woman), they believe that by doing so, they are getting rid of inhibitions that might otherwise do them psychological and even physical harm.
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theodore_dalrymple socialcritique england morality commentary