[OBSCURA] JaMmCat, "Vesta Lunch-- for breakfast, dinner and lunch"

This nighttime shot of Vesta Lunch, at the intersection of Bathurst and Dupont in the marchlands between downtown and midtown, is striking and originally taken on film. My positive review in 2005 of Vesta Lunch was overrated: it's a greasy spoon restaurant that overemphasizes the grease.

[LINK] "Is Facebook a fad?"

Over at Slate Farhad Manjoo thinks that Facebook is too embedded to disappear, as much as Google might try to compete.

Let me go out on a limb and declare that Facebook isn't going to go away anytime soon. The site is more entrenched than just about any other technology we use. It's easy to go to a new search engine—just type Bing instead of Google—and there's nothing stopping you from switching your brand of computer or cellphone. You can't switch over to a new social network, though, unless your friends do so as well. Sure, this could happen—fashions change, of course, and the inherent stickiness of social networks didn't save all the ones that came before Facebook. But Facebook seems to have hit a critical mass. Not only does it have a huge number of users (more than any previous social network), but its audience is spread across every demographic (which wasn't true of MySpace), and they're ferociously committed to the site (nearly half log in every day). It also shows no signs of slowing its growth—and the bigger Facebook gets, the harder it becomes to switch to a new platform. If a storm of criticism surrounding its privacy practices and its frequent, confusing redesigns haven't done anything to stem its growth (and those controversies haven't), I'm not sure what could push Facebook off the main stage in the near term.

The big question for the future of social networking isn't whether Facebook will be the largest and most influential site five years from now. It's whether it will be the only one. Will Facebook be the exclusive catalog of our interests and relationships, or will it coexist with several others?

[. . .]

Google doesn't have access to the motherlode of your social activity: stuff you post on Facebook itself, data that is closed off to mining from most other companies online. Every time you press the Like button or use one of Facebook's plugins to post a comment, you're telling Facebook something about yourself and your friends. What's more, Facebook's reach keeps extending. Today, many people connect their activity on a host of sites—including Twitter, Flickr, Quora, Amazon, and Yelp—with their Facebook accounts. They do so because it makes intuitive sense to keep one social network—maintaining separate networks on different sites is too much work. If we're sticking to one network, it makes sense to stay where all our friends are—and that's Facebook.

This will be especially true if Facebook adds better tools for maintaining discrete groups within our larger friend network (which it already does quite well). In other words, hey, maybe Facebook already has this social-networking thing all wrapped up. We don't know what the site will look like by 2016; it's possible that, with all the ways it's infiltrating the wider Web, Facebook.com will be just one small part of the Facebook empire. You may be using Facebook wherever you are online—and no other network will matter.

Manjoo suspects that Facebook's indexing might even provide the basic organizing structure for the Internet, by tracking everyone's interests superbly.

Go, read.

[LINK] "Fear the People"

James Bow is decidedly unimpressed with the Conservative Party's efforts to control their party's electoral campaign. I have to admit to being impressed by these efforts; clearly, they care, a lot.

A few days ago, 19-year-old London Ontario resident Awish Aslam decided to take a interest in this current election. As she was voting for the first time in her life, she set out to examine the parties closely, attend their rallies and speak to their candidates before making up her mind. Michael Ignatieff happened to come to town soon after the election was called. She came out to his rally, met the man, and had her photograph taken with him — a photo which appeared on her Facebook page. She also managed to get her picture taken with Jack Layton, but this didn’t feature quite as prominently.

Hearing that Stephen Harper was coming to town, she decided to attend his rally. With the help of a friend’s father, a card-carrying Conservative, she registered for the event. But when she and her friend showed up, she was in for a surprise:

About 30 minutes after arriving and signing in, the two girls were asked by a man to follow him out of the rally, Aslam said. Though confused, they complied.

In a back room, Aslam said he ripped off their name tags, tore them up and ordered them out.

“We were confused. He said, ‘We know you guys have ties to the Liberal party through Facebook’. He said … ‘You are no longer welcome here.’”

It’s important to note that this account is hearsay; for now, it’s her word against the rally organizers, although campaign official Dimitri Soudis has offered a pre-emptory apology. However, since this incident came to light, separate but similar incidents have also been reported, suggesting a pattern of behaviour within the Conservative party. At the same London rally, Ali Aref Hamadi was asked to leave simply because he had an NDP bumper sticker on his car (it’s not known whether Tory operatives confronted him as he left his vehicle, suggesting that they were stalking the parking lot for such attendees, or if it was the fact that his face was on another bumper sticker — he’s considering running as an independent in the upcoming provincial election — allowed the Conservative staffers to identify him in the rally itself; personally, I’m not sure which option is more sinister). In Guelph, students hoping to stage a non-partisan event (delivering a message saying “Surprise! Youth are voting!”) were also identified and asked to leave the venue. Another young woman, who said she just wanted to hear Stephen Harper speak, claimed she was turned away when screening by the RCMP turned up evidence of her work with the environmental group, the Sierra Youth Coalition.

The other parties are starting to make a lot of hay out of this, especially in light of the continuing scandal of Bruce Carson, an advisor to the Prime Minister, gaining access to high level documents despite convictions for five counts of fraud. The Prime Minister seems to like to keep his political rallies far more secure than his own political office, they said.

But the core of this story is this: you apparently have to register to attend a political rally held by the Conservative party these days, during a political campaign where, theoretically at least, Conservative politicians like Stephen Harper want to talk to Canadians to secure their vote. The Liberals don’t have this restriction. The NDP’s Jack Layton showed up with his bus in downtown Kitchener the other day, and I’m pretty sure that if I’d chosen to, I could have walked up, shaken his hand, and asked him a tough question about vote splitting.

Go, read.

[LINK] "Web Semantics: Bad Writing Doesn’t Matter Any More"

Expanding on this post at the Self-Publishing Review blog, Bruce Sterling suggests dire things for the future of writing. First, the original poster.

It used to be the refrain about self-publishing that to do it right you needed to hire a professional book-cover designer and a professional editor. While there is no doubt that self-publishers should do this, it doesn’t really seem to be the case that this entirely matters anymore. Plainly, we’re entering a new phase where people approach writing differently. People will forgive problems for a cheap read.

Roxanne Gay has a post on HTML Giant which repeats the age-old mantra about gatekeepers:

Quality is certainly very subjective but even with that, given the self-published work I’ve read (admittedly not an adequate sample to really draw broader conclusions) there’s a reason most of those self-published books were not picked up by publishers great or small. There was no misunderstood genius in these novels. These books fell through the proverbial cracks for a reason. As an editor it was painfully easy to identify the weaknesses in plot, characterization, tone, dialogue, pacing and all the other elements that comprise a good book. Some of these books were adequately written but boring. Some of these books were plain terrible and filled with sloppy writing, making the very strong case for the value of a competent copyeditor and the value of a gatekeeper to say, “no,” this book should not be published, at least not in its current state. These were not books that could be published by anyone but the writer themselves.

So gatekeepers are good because they separate the wheat from the chaff, etc. etc. There is a major point missing from this argument: readers don’t care. Bad, “unpublishable” books are finding an audience. I cannot claim to have read many of the books on the Kindle self-published bestseller list, but without a doubt there are many books that some people would find totally inept, but are finding an audience with many honest 5-star reviews.

Next, Sterling.

This is the harbinger of a dominant electronic vernacular language. “Bad” is the wrong word for a major transition of this kind. It’s too big and powerful to be stigmatized. People are inputting and reading much, much more texts from screens than they ever see from a printed page, and the majority standard of textual expression, by a tremendous margin, is the SMS.

*The unseen literary player here is machine translation. It’s getting “better” fast, and we may soon be in a world where on-demand machine-translated texts become major literary influences. The real web-semantic breakthrough would be a machine-assisted ability to painlessly read texts outside one’s own language. At that point we’ll have entered an unheard-of state of linguistic globalized electro-pidgin.

*Grammatical spellchecking and “autotuning” of texts may change the literary landscape, too. “Bad” writing may be pursued and silently extinguished by the operating-system, much like a self-focussing camera. The Web will be supporting more and more of the scutwork of semantics.

[URBAN NOTE] On the new Ryerson University building at Yonge and Gould

The corner of Yonge and Gould in downtown Toronto once hosted the flagship store of the Sam the Record Man chain.



This store was closed down in June 2007 and finally being torn down in 2009.



The corner was intended to host a new building for the ever-expanding Ryerson University. Now, thanks to Torontoist, we have pictures.



The below picture closely approximates the angle of the first picture in this post.

Renderings of the design for Ryerson University's new Student Learning Centre—which will be built where Sam the Record Man once stood—are out (leaked to the Star last night and officially released in a press conference a few minutes ago), and competing opinions are already flying around the pages of Toronto's newspapers. Designed by Toronto's Zeidler Partnership Architects in collaboration with Snøhetta (Oslo, Norway and New York City), the building will cost $112 million (the province is kicking in $45 million of that) and is scheduled for completion by the winter of 2014.

The glass-fronted, eight-storey centre will include study spaces, meeting rooms, and street-level retail, and will meet LEED silver certification standards. Fans are applauding the design's transparency, sense of openness, and light, and especially its attempt to be an open window for students onto the city, and for the city into Ryerson. Detractors, meanwhile, are lambasting the building for lacking any sense of context or history.

The building, in at least one sense, is a very natural fit for Ryerson: in its reliance on primarily open areas, suited for group meetings and chance conversations, it's a turn to a more "modern" understanding of what a study space should be. This morning's press release trumpeted that sense of collaboration and connection: "The notion that learning is a static, solitary activity is outmoded," we are told. Whether Ryerson students find themselves agreeing is a fascinating question.

[DM] "How migration contributed to the meltdown in Côte d'Ivoire"

I've a post up at Demography Matters that briefly explains how Ivoirien ethnic nationalism managed to transform West African Côte d'Ivoire from a prosperous multicultural polity to a country that's being wrecked by civil war. How migration contributed to the meltdown in Côte d'Ivoire