Earlier this week, the Conservatives rolled out a series of cuts that can only be called vindictive. They targeted programs dear to the Liberals and have no budgetary justification given the massive surplus currently held in federal coffers.
One of the programs under attack is the Law Commission of Canada. My colleague, Darin Barney, who has volunteered a lot of time for the organization over the past few years, organized an open letter to the Justice minister. You can read it here.
This morning I opened my email to find a letter from a friend who had stumbled on an essay I wrote over 11 years ago. (Which is a long time when you’re not out of your 30s yet.) Having little idea of what I’d said back then, I investigated. The piece, called “The Many Names of Politics,” serves as the introduction to an issue of Bad Subjects but also as a bit of a manifesto itself about the relationship between intellectual and political work. Reading it now, I’m struck by how much I’ve apparently forgotten in the interim. One of the main theses of the piece is about “the positive move” — that critique has no meaningful purpose without a vision of the good. And here I was thinking that I’d made a “new” turn toward more normative questions in my more recent work. Nope. It’s been there all along. It just got sidelined as I was busy doing things like building up research expertise.
Of course, the other striking thing about the intro and the issue is the presence of the International Socialist Organization (ISO), which I find more cringeworthy now than I did then. In 1995, I had several friends who had joined the ISO and were actively involved. I never joined for a variety of reasons, but within a few years all of my friends had actually been purged from the ISO. Some of whom had given many hours and days of their busy lives to it. As to the New Party, I haven’t heard–or read–anything about it in years.
The peace I’ve made in my own mind is to find organizations working for something tangible and to let my thinking roam the halls of utopia. Since moving here, it’s been limited to marching with people and writing stuff, but that too will change when the right group comes along.
I’ve updated my blogroll. Hopefully, I’ve added everyone who’s linked to me, whom I read, or who sent me an email saying “I have a blog.” If I missed you, let me know.
Today I went to CBC’s studio for a taped interview. They were interviewing me about my “Inaudible City” talk at the Champ Libre conference last weekend. Which was really cool except there’s something about starting at and speaking into a Neumann microphone . . .
…that makes me feel considerably less eloquent than I do when speaking with others or talking on the phone. If I’m not mistaken, there is some historian of sound technology who’s written about the radio-performance-effect. I think I read that somewhere. . . .
Anyway, the show is Cinq à Six and it’s airing between (surprise) 5 and 6 on Saturday. And you should be able to get it online from their site.
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In other news, the categories at the right have been proliferating. So I moved it below the links and blogroll. Nevertheless, I’ve only coded the summer and already it’s looking like I talk about a lot of stuff. Whether all this categorization will be useful to anyone, I have no idea. But if there’s one thing I like to do–besides make lists–is to place things in categories.
So two of the interviews I gave appeared in print, and the gun quote appeared in both. Which makes me think in some small way it was worthwhile.
I’ve reproduced the Montreal Gazette piece below. You can read the Hour piece here. There’s only one obvious problem with the Hour piece: never in my life have I claimed to any person (or for that matter any machine) that my area of specialization is “in the impact of new media and technology on crime.” But at least the quotes are right.
A city in crisis grabs cellphone::[Final Edition]
BERNARD PERUSSE. The Gazette. Montreal, Que.:Sep 18, 2006. p. D1Students reached out to loved ones, drawing them closer to Wednesday’s events
Alexis Boulva was frustrated by the 20 minutes it took him to reach and reassure friends and family in the wake of last week’s shootings at Dawson College.
The 20-year-old student in electronics technology said he was about 50 feet away when the shootings took place.
He made a first attempt to call his father while huddling with other students in an administration office. He was unsuccessful.
After he had left the campus, he walked to a friend’s house. En route, at 1:50 p.m., he was able to use his cell and lost no time.
By his count, he made five quick calls – to his parents, some friends and his girlfriend’s family – and fired off a text message to his sister. He received roughly the same number of calls.
“I was pretty lucky to be able to get away from the action fairly quickly, but other people weren’t as lucky, and weren’t able to call their loved ones and tell them what was going on,” he said.
Wednesday’s shooting spree was the first Montreal crisis in which cellphones seemed ubiquitous – so ubiquitous that that’s why Boulva couldn’t call out: cellphone circuits were overloaded.
When the Ecole Polytechnique massacre took place in 1989, the de rigueur cellphone for virtually every student on college campuses was in the future. After 9/11, however, we would struggle to forget the images of spouses making that last call home to their families on a cellphone. The immediacy of those final moments seemed to forever redefine the way people react in a crisis.
During the hour following the first evacuation of students on Wednesday, Telus reported 11 times more calls than normal, while Bell Mobility reported 20 times more activity.
“Within seconds, I’d say, we noticed a change of behaviour within our network,” said Guy Raymond, engineering and operations vice- president of Bell Mobility’s wireless network.
“And as we monitored the news at our control centre, we linked it with the tragic event. Immediately, we went into crisis mode. Our technical experts were online and ready to take action.”
Police and emergency response teams were quickly provided with extra network capacity, he said, although the increased demand in a very small area made it impossible to process all calls from regular users.
Cellphones “give people involved in the event a way to both coordinate their actions with one another and get messages back and forth very quickly,” said Jonathan Sterne, an associate professor of communication studies at McGill University.
“That’s a wonderful thing, in the sense that there’s this outpouring of information from the scene almost the minute it happens.
“But the flip side of that is that there are many competing stories, and that was one of the big issues” on Wednesday.
Sterne said the use of cellphones in a crisis serves another important function, one that changes the way we receive information in moments of panic.
“It provides a way for people at a distance to become more involved in the event than they would otherwise. It’s a multidirectional medium, as opposed to the broadcast media. You have people actually involved communicating.
“That can be as simple as someone calling friends and family members and saying, ‘I’m safe,’ or it can be very elaborate ways of getting your version of the story or getting the information out – for instance, somebody who’s got a cellphone through which they can post a blog.”
On Wednesday, some students used their phones to transmit photos, even video.
Sterne was not prepared to conclude that frantic cellphone action in the aftermath of the shooting contributed to the panic.
“Traditional TV coverage can also feed widespread panic very quickly, but because it’s unidirectional, people are just sitting there watching, saying, ‘There’s nothing I can do,’ where at least with a phone call, there’s some back-and-forth.”
That back-and-forth helped bring a measure of relief to many parents. After learning about the incident from a work colleague, who also has a daughter at the CEGEP, Marilyn Melnick-Beinglas phoned her son Rafi, 17, a student in the arts and culture department.
“He had run out of the building and, with bravado, said, ‘Oh, Mom, everything’s OK. There’s lots of police.’ I said ‘Rafi, get out of the area.’ ”
A second and third call allowed her to keep in touch with her son, she said. “It was really bizarre to me when I heard afterward that the lines were down. I got through to him three times between 1 and 1:30.”
Stacey Masson, a Telus spokesperson, said text messaging, which takes up less bandwidth than a conventional call, was a viable option for some during the peak overload hour Wednesday. And while the sudden and unforeseeable nature of the day’s horror allowed for no planning, the company has two
SATCOLT systems (satellite cell sites on light trucks) ready to help emergency responders and government officials in the event of a more prolonged crisis that threatens communication, like the ice storm of 1998 or the World Trade Centre disaster in New York.
Neither Telus nor Bell Mobility would provide statistics to show whether communication between family members has increased via sales of family-oriented plans in the last few years.
“They’re a strong product within our portfolio, and families take advantage of them,” Raymond said.
Sterne said it is important to keep the cellphone issue in perspective. “If you’re talking about the importance of technology in this event, the most important technology was the gun,” he said. “Everything else seems so much more minor than that.”
have been underused on this blog. From here on out, following the del.icio.us model, they will be overused. I just tagged up the front page in like 1 minute. Now I’m off to breakfast.
So I was speaking on the phone with a friend last night who has just moved from Canada to take an academic job in the U.S. So I did to her what all the Canadians did to me when we arrived here. “So? What’s it like? What are the differences? Have you considered starting a blog?” I asked. She mentioned three things that are immediately obvious but that I’d already forgotten:
1. American undergradaute students are much more likely to be religious.
2. You can’t get a drink anywhere on campus.
3. Everyone eats lunch at their desks.
These three items are probably related [cough]PURITANISM[/cough] but let me focus on #2.
Before moving to McGill, I had only even heard of one campus where it would be possible to get a drink. That was the bar at UW-Madison, which was both quirky (ooo! a bar on campus!) and legendary. Now, perhaps as a faculty member I should have been able to get a drink at a faculty club. But if the University of Pittsburgh had a faculty club, I never saw it. And the faculty club at the University of Minnesota, where I once dined with a prof, didn’t seem to have any alcohol.
Of course, at McGill faculty members have the choice of the faculty club and Thomson House, both of which are regularly used following talks. Though I choose Thomson House whenever possible. I’d never even heard of a graduate student union before coming here. It’s a great idea. And though I drink very little, there is some deep comment about the sociability of academic life both here and “back home down south.” I didn’t think of academic life as not sociable in the U.S. until I moved here. . . . Though to be fair, it varies by institution and location. The lunch thing, meanwhile speaks of an orientation toward work in general, which is still very much in me even though I relish the sociability of McGill’s culture. I still tend to view lunch as a meal that interferes with the workday. So I eat it at my desk. Goddamned Protestant Ethic.
