Mixed Ink: collaborative op-ed writing
“This Mickey Mouse operation is the future of news? That’s not the most frightening prospect. Even if Twitter were competently run and profitable, the end result is an unreadable jumble. Look closely at the coverage, if you can call it that, of the Mumbai attacks on Twitter. Sitting at their desks in the U.S., most people had nothing to add except to observe that Mumbai used to be called Bombay — the kind of message that makes you wish Twitter’s length limit was zero characters, not 140.” – Owen Thomas. Like most of you with access to a television/computer Wednesday afternoon, I was glued to the news. But soon, #Mumbai was crowded with far too cut+pastes to be of much relevance (unless one was searching by location.) It’s like how everyone will join a Facebook group for a good cause — it takes 5 seconds to “retweet” breaking news. Then, there was the bizarre back and forth over whether the Indian government was asking for people to stop tweeting “sensitive information.” If anything impressed me that night, it was the network evening news, who appeared to be the first to put it all in context.
One of the mystery photos in LOC’s crowdsourcing Flickr experiment turned out to be my hometown back in the 1940s: “Sylvia Sweets Tea Room” in Brockton, Massachusetts. The daughter of the late owners of the restaurant left a comment on the photo giving further background. It makes me somewhat sad to read the comments (”me god such a lovely place !!!”) because I never knew the city this way. Home of the first department-store Santa Claus. The city’s big industry — shoes — was nonexistent by 1970. Although boxing is still a big deal there and I hear great things about The Fuller Craft Museum (still one of my favorite buildings.) And like any post-industrial town, there are attempts to coax the creative class into “loft condos.” Now Brockton is a place for those who “like hearing gun shots and 5 year old kids cussin worse than most adults and seeing creak heads walking around all day.” LOC has a number of Norman Rockwell Brockton snapshots. But so much has changed.
-
A collection of interesting ideas curated by
Joanne McNeil. About ➚
Sponsors
