Unsubtle Upsell Via Amazon.ca

I understand I'm being upsold, but do you really have to be so blunt about it?

Sharrow Minded: The Lose-Lose Compromise of Toronto Bike Lanes

I'm happy to report a bit of good news has occurred since I got all whiny about sharrows in the current issue of Spacing -- Bixi Toronto now has over 800 members signed up. (When my article went to press there were only 400). That's obviously very encouraging. (I should note that despite already owning a bike, I've signed up for Bixi. You should too.)

To celebrate, I'm posting the aforementioned article on my blog. I've also included two photos of a bike lane protest intervention at Harbord and Borden that I'm rather fond of.

Sharrow Minded

The large ebbs and little flows of bike culture in Toronto

Spacing | Fall 2010 | Ryan Bigge

In the spring of this year, sharrows appeared on College Street west of Manning. Neither a type of bird nor a new venereal disease, sharrows consist of a bike icon and two chevrons (arrow thingies) and are short for “shared lane pavement marking.” The first word of that phrase is clearly the most crucial, since “share” appears no less than nine times in the City of Toronto’s PDF explanation. The intent of sharrows is to remind drivers that cyclists also belong on the road, and are being tried on a few major downtown streets where it’s not possible to build a proper bike lane.

But the sharing message is clearly not being universally heard; this past summer, campaign vehicles belonging to both Joe Pantalone (a Smart car) and Rob Ford (a motorhome) were photographed parked in bike lanes. These incidents served as a reminders that Toronto cycling lanes continue to be treated as though they were invisible. If drivers refuse to recognize the legitimacy of the bicycle, then peaceful co-existence through sharrows is impossible, no matter how many times a municipal bureaucrat tells us that sharing, sharing, sharing, sharing, sharing, sharing, sharing, sharing, sharing the road is right thing to do.

The best description of the problem comes courtesy of Spacing editor Shawn Micallef, who wrote in a March 2010 column in Eye Weekly that “Toronto is in the weird in-between space of being almost a full-on alpha city, embracing all its big-cityness, and just another second-tier city in the eastern part of North America.” In alpha cities like New York, driving is awful, while in second-tier cities, driving is still relatively pleasant. As Micallef concludes, “we’re in that middle zone of cityness: though it can be hard to drive here, the city’s transit and cycling infrastructures haven’t caught up to make not-driving a completely viable option for everybody.”

This in-between state helps explain the lose-lose political compromise of the sharrows and the defeat of the University bike lane trial in early 2010. Without realistic methods of alternative transportation, who can blame drivers for thinking they still deserve to own the road? Study after study demonstrates that creating a safe and inviting cycling infrastructure requires protected bike lanes that form a continuous grid. Making this happen, however, will require more than the benign neglect of the David Miller era – a mayor who prided himself on appearing to promote cycling. One can only imagine what a mayor actively hostile toward cyclists will accomplish in four years.

By not delivering on the ten-year cycling plan created in 2001 that promised 1,000 km of bike route (we got less than half instead), Miller has provided cycling opponents with a legitimate opportunity to backpedal on bike lanes. Certainly when compared with 2005, when only 1 km worth of bike lane was built, David Miller’s second term in office has provided the appearance of momentum. There were 34.9 km of bike lane created in 2008, 13 km in 2009, and 2010 promises and additional 5 km of lanes, along with 7.1 km of sharrows. Which makes this momentum illusionary, akin to someone working up a sweat on a stationary bicycle.

Granted, there have been some victories including the formation and continued growth of the Toronto Cyclists Union, secure bike lockers at Union Station the bittersweet success of the Jarvis street makeover; and the 2.1 magnificent kilometers that comprise the West Toronto RailPath. According to a January 2010 City of Toronto Cycling Survey, there has been a 6% increase in the number of cyclists in Toronto over the last decade (from 48% to 54%). However, “when asked to rate the quality of cycling routes and facilities in the city today, scores are the same, or in some cases, directionally lower than there were reported 10 years ago.”

This fall's launch of the Bixi bike program in Toronto will serve as an unofficial referendum on whether or not cycling is considered to be a safe and mainstream method of transportation. If Bixi fails to get 1,000 subscribers before the November 30 deadline the initiative will be cancelled (as this went to press nearly 500 people had signed up since Bixi launched on July 28). And who can blame people for not signing up for a bike share program in a city where cycling can be as aggravating as driving or public transit? (The 2009 Cycling Survey notes that “only one-third of cyclists say they are comfortable biking on major roads without bike lanes.”) David Miller proudly promoting Bixi without providing an adequate bike grid is putting the car(t) before the bike.

Bike lanes might seem like a minor issue given the various challenges the city faces, but our underperforming cycling grid is one of the reasons that Toronto has never appeared in Monocle’s Top 25 Liveable Cities index. (Montreal and Vancouver, meanwhile, both have.) While Monocle is guilty of promoting expensive lifestyle consumerism for global elites, it treats public transportation with the seriousness it deserves. As editor-in-chief Tyler Brule explained to PSFK.com in June of this year, Copenhagen ranks highly because you can take a train from the airport to downtown “and then you can immediately get on a bicycle and never have to deal with a car ever again. That’s why it does well.”

Toronto politicians and cyclists need to be more aggressive about the future of spokes on pavement. Instead of looking at cycling developments on a year-by-year basis, it might be more effective (if not more depressing) to consider the long-term picture. In the spring of this year a small photocopied letter to the editor of the Toronto Star appeared on various Toronto street poles. Titled “Real Bike Lanes Are Long Overdue!” it began by asking “What good is a bicycle lane if cars are allowed to park in it? The bicycle lanes of Toronto are an insult to cyclists. At best, they are ornamental.” The letter writer, Noa Stroyman, goes on to note that “The roughest pavement is always that which is in the bike lanes” and argues for protected, European-style bike lanes “as wide as a car lane, physically divided from the car lanes by a curb or poles.”

This combination wish- and shit-list is nothing new. Which was exactly the point the person who stapled this photocopy everywhere was trying to make. The letter was published on Sunday, March 12, 1995. Fifteen years later, the same problems remain. The number of kilometers of bike lane in Toronto is a meaningless metric until the psychology of cycling changes.

Becoming an alpha city, or even a world-class city requires multiple transportation options. Remaining a second-tier city means saying “no” to anything that might challenge the dominance of the automobile. By that measure, Toronto remains a sharrow-minded, second-tier city.

Bike Lanes As Politicized As Abortion According to Rob Ford

I was reading my brand new copy of dandyhorse yesterday, which features profiles of various cyclists and/or mayoral candidates. I could not help but choke on the final Q&A from the Rob Ford profile:

What about the Toronto Bike Plan?
The problem with bicycles is that they have become a political issue -- saying I'll put in bike lanes gets the support of cyclists, but the rest of the voters will hate me. The debate has become equivalent to abortion -- whatever I say, someone will be angry.

No further comment required.

Your Content Strategy Homework For This Week’s Toronto CS Meetup

In the spirit of the new school year, the Toronto Content Strategy Meetup has decided to assign a bit of homework for the 6:30pm, Thursday  September 16 edition.

If you’re interested in attending (and why wouldn’t you be?) please listen (or watch) this recent one hour pod- / videocast of content strategy guru Kristina Halverson being interviewed by User Interface Engineering CEO Jared Spool.

We’ll drink a few beers and debate a few ideas and issues raised during the interview, including:

1) When should you consider hiring an SEO expert instead of a content strategist (and vice-versa?)

2) How critical are content strategy success stories for building momentum within the discipline and how can they best be achieved?

3) Under what circumstances can/should information architecture and content strategy be handled by the same person?

4) What is the best way to measure the overall effectiveness of content strategy for clients?


See you all there!

The Scariest Paragraph About Freelancing I Have Ever Read

Freelancing is that remarkable stretch from February to December 2009, where I wrote entire features… using only my phone, a first-generation iPhone jailbroken for T-mobile, bought for $100 from a friend at Mac Week. That was because my computer had broken and I couldn't afford a replacement.

(Richard Morgan's ghost story for The Awl).

Elizabeth Spiers on Digital Mistakes

Q: How do traditional mainstream get digital products wrong?

A: (I gave a talk about this a couple of weeks ago, so from my notes:) They don't understand their audiences because they're not used to using data aggressively.

They view their sites as mere brand extensions and fail to treat them as stand-alone media properties.

They don't understand usability and make their sites pretty but impossible to navigate, and then naively think they'll educate their users to find their content.

They don't understand Web metabolism and produce content that's stale.

They think Web content is inherently inferior when it's merely different, and create inferior Web products as a result then wonder why they're not succeeding.

They fail to monetize their products properly, then underpay talent and wonder why they can't recruit good writers.

--Elizabeth Spiers

Algorithmic Niche Culture is Killing the Romance: Toronto Star Reprint

Books are losing out to the algorithms of love

The mathematics of identifying niche behaviour and interests promises to bring like-minded people together. But it may be tearing society apart

Toronto Star | August 27, 2010 | Ryan Bigge

Last month in Slate.com, Mark Oppenheimer wrote about the latest trauma inflicted by the e-book revolution. It wasn’t lower prices turning novelists into ever more wretched paupers or copyright quandaries that make it impossible to share your favourite e-book with friends. No, the problem for Oppenheimer was that e-book readers make it impossible for randy bibliophiles to judge prospective lovers by their collection of book covers.

                          

“As the Kindle and Nook march on, people’s reading choices will increasingly be hidden from view,” writes Oppenheimer. “We’ll go into people’s houses or squeeze next to them on the subway, and we’ll no longer be able to know them, or judge them, or love them, or reject them, based on the books they carry.”

                           

His panic turned out to be premature, however. Two days before Oppenheimer published his lament, alikewise.com launched “a dating site that allows you to find people based on their book tastes.” Sadly, alikewise.com is not an anomaly, as specialty dating services are becoming increasingly common — Apple cult members have Cupidtino.com, indie rock fans visit Tastebuds.fm and followers of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism have theatlasphere.com. And while such sites should eventually serve to cull their respective populations through vicious inbreeding, they reflect a larger problem — the triumph of algorithmic niche culture.

                           

As Devin Leonard explains in the August issue of Wired, Hunch.com is trying to personalize the Internet by soliciting people’s opinions, beliefs and tastes and then mining the data “for correlations that provide precisely tailored recommendations for each user.” Hunch.com is not alone, with similar services provided by GetGlue.com. The interest in these sites are obvious — there’s big money in artificial serendipity. In September of 2009, Netflix awarded a $1 million prize to a team of statisticians and computer engineers who created movie rental recommendation software that was 10 per cent more accurate.

                           

The problem isn’t that the educated guesses of Netflix or Hunch.com are inaccurate — quite the opposite. But the mathematics behind the niche-ification of everything threatens to destroy the very fabric of democratic society. Or, at the very least, create some very nasty blog postings.

In a May article in The New York Review of Books about the Tea Party movement and the “politics of the libertarian mob,” Mark Lilla refers to Bill Bishop’s 2009 book The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart. As Lilla notes, “People with higher degrees who care about food and wine, support gay rights, and want few children but good Internet connections have been gravitating to urban centres on the two coasts, while churchgoing families that drive everywhere, socialize with relatives, and send their kids to state universities have been heading to the growing exurbs of the southern and mountain states.” This, as you can imagine, causes problems for politicians trying to find consensus among an increasingly polarized electorate.

                           

But according to Adam Sternbergh, things are not entirely bleak. In the January 2010 issue of New York magazine, he explained that we are still united by events like Avatar and the launch of the iPad, but the binding mechanism is now pre-announcement buzz and speculation. “Once we experience something en masse — or even as we experience it — we splinter off to our myriad forums to broadcast our personal takes.”

                           

Another reason to avoid complete despair is that even a NASA supercomputer is unable to persuade us to enjoy certain algorithmically generated suggestions. Writing in the New York Times Magazine last October, Rob Walker explained how the Internet radio service Pandora was slicing songs into their atomic parts of enjoyability to better determine listener matches. The problems Pandora has encountered (music fans made irate by suggestions such as Celine Dion or Journey) will be familiar to anyone ever set up on a blind date by friends.

                           

Which highlights the biggest blind spot of the algorithmic niche — its target audience is irrational, unpredictable, contradictory human beings. And not taking this into account appears to be the largest predictive failure of them all. If we can’t trust Pandora to pick a great song, it’s unlikely that alikewise.com can help us locate a soulmate.

                           

As is so often the case, a popular sitcom provides necessary wisdom and perspective. During the first season of Modern Family, a recently remarried Jay explains to his 30-something son Mitchell that opposites not only do, but should, attract. “We’re both with people different from us and that’s gonna create stuff,” notes Jay. “But you want different. Your mom and I were perfect on paper and you know how that ended.”

                           

It’s good advice, although undercut slightly by the episode’s conclusion, wherein Jay’s wife Gloria mistakenly believes her husband is about to marry a life-sized statue of a dog butler named Barkley. Then again, love is also blind. Which means it doesn’t matter if the boy or girl sitting across from you in the subway is reading Stieg Larsson or Gary Shteyngart. As long as they’re cute (and hate Journey) the complex and irrational numbers that comprise the algebra of love will take care of the rest.

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Toronto Content Strategy Group Meeting This Thursday

As readers may or may not have noticed in the About Me section of my blog, I now offer content strategy services, along with cultural journalism and editing. (I also make and drink classic cocktails, but that’s less relevant to my professional aspirations).

Anyway, James Houston (@jimmy2bills ) has been kind enough to organize a Toronto Content Strategy Group. We meet the third Thursday of every month.

The next meeting is this Thursday, August 19, 2010 starting at 6pm at the Rivoli, upstairs. I’ve attended the last two meetings, and they’ve been fun and engaging. (Meetup details here).

The idea is to debate and define best practices for the developing discipline of Content Strategy through short, informal presentations and beer-fueled discussions. (We also hope to bring in guest speakers at some point this spring.)

Because there is a lot of overlap between web editors, information architects, copywriters and other content people, the field of CS attracts a diverse bunch, producing lively conversations about the current role and future evolution of the discipline. In short, there is more and more content out there on the web, and producing valuable words that are easily findable is going to be increasingly important over the next five years and beyond.

For those who have heard the term Content Strategy being tossed around, but aren’t 100 percent sure what it’s all about, I recommend the following:

* Excellent primer on CS

* CS guru Kristina Halvorson makes her case for CS

* Jeffrey MacIntyre on why CS matters
* Great list of CS resources

* #contentstrategy hashtag

Greedy Little Eyes by Billie Livingston (Book Review Reprint)

Greedy Little Eyes: Stories of observance

A scavenger of the wistful and generous sort

Toronto Star | August 7, 2010 | Ryan Bigge

In a recent article for Slate, Jessica Winter discussed how writer-director Noah Baumbach (Greenberg; The Squid and the Whale) takes great pleasure in populating his films with narcissists and misanthropes.

As if that were not enough, many of these disagreeable characters also have greedy little eyes, since, as Winter argues, “A Baumbach protagonist wears his pretensions like armor, but the pose of detachment is also the stance of the fiction writer or critic (incidentally, Baumbach is the son of both), who benefits from a ruthless facility for treating events and people as potential content to be appropriated or evaluated.”

In her new collection of short stories, Greedy Little Eyes, Billie Livingston, or rather one of her protagonists (a freelance magazine journalist named Lila), makes a similar observation in “Candy From a Stranger’s Mouth.” As Lila studies two adulterous lovers in a restaurant, she notes that “I have been accused, in the past, of sitting back, busily thinking up pithy descriptors that I might later use in an article. To some people this is the behaviour of a scavenger.”

Livingston might be a scavenger, but she does not have a ruthless facility. Her eyes are greedy but her stories are generous and wistful as they borrow and return delicate family secrets without breaking them. While her stories are also filled with narcissists and misanthropes, they are almost always antagonists, trying to ruin or frustrate the ambitions of dependable, reliable, plodding heroines: An unappreciated woman who works as an assistant manager at a music store. A woman stuck running a paper store out of family obligation. A librarian with an overprotective father who’s trying to ruin her marriage. All deserve better.

There are, however, moments of redemption and revenge, such as the arrest of a strange attacker in “Make Yourself Feel Better” and the surreal, gorgeous violence of “Did You Grow Up with Money?”

While much of Livingston’s material is relevant and contemporary (an affair revealed by Facebook snooping; Robert Pickton’s pig farm) a few stories feel dusty, such as a fictional retelling of Vancouver performance artist Rick Gibson’s unsuccessful attempt to drop a 25-kg block of concrete onto a rat named Sniffy in 1990. This might be personal bias, but as an ex-Vancouverite who survived the wackadoodle reign of Socred premier Bill Vander Zalm (1986-1991), I feel that no fiction should ever try and compete with the off-kilter reality of that era.

Then again, the little eyes of book reviewers are often jaded. Never satisfied, always making further demands from the authors they are asked to evaluate. Livingston offers many memorable sentences: “The man on the ground struggles with the vagueness of a nature-show cheetah just shot with tranquilizer.” “To my ears the words had a liquid quality, as if they’d been left out in the rain.” “Something in him looked refurbished to me.”

But her default prose style is dependable and unflashy, just like her heroines. I don’t wish to sound greedy (or worse, display a ruthless facility for evaluation), but this collection could use at least another dozen sparkly moments of wordplay. Such prosaic lives certainly deserve to be sprinkled with a bit more magic of the ordinary.

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Exposed! Philip Carr-Gomm's A Brief History of Nakedness

Picture and a thousand words: Philip Carr-Gomm's A Brief History of Nakedness 
Toronto Star | August 8, 2010 | Ryan Bigge

Reaktion Books

It’s safe to say that Philip Carr-Gomm is the rare man of letters who would admit to reading Playboy for the centrefolds, rather than the articles. His new book, A Brief History of Nakedness, is exactly what it sounds like, complete with numerous photographs such as the one seen above. But rather than providing flimsy justifications for his ogling, the book instead offers a sustained mediation on the spiritual, cultural and political implications of being naked in public.

The 50 peaceful women seen here are part of Baring Witness, a group of Iraq war protesters who posed nude in West Marin County, California, in November of 2002. As Carr-Gomm argues, “Nakedness makes a human being particularly vulnerable but in certain circumstances strangely powerful, which is why it has become so popular as a vehicle for political protest.” According to Carr-Gomm, by disrobing, protestors demonstrate that they are both fearless and have nothing to hide.

At least, that’s the ideal situation. Sometimes the political intentions of being in the buff can get lost, as happened during the recent expressions of G20 activism. “There’s a naked guy at Queen and Peter,” @one_more_night tweeted. “I think he’s protesting clothes.”

For a cold, northern country, there’s a surprising amount of clothing animosity in Canada. (Our country’s first nudist club formed in 1918, while it took until 1929 for the United States to be able to say the same.) In his book, Carr-Gomm mentions the Toronto-based Naked News (“the program with nothing to hide”), Montreal-born artist Cosimo Cavallaro (who, in 2005, created a chocolate sculpture of a nude Christ entitled Sweet Jesus) and the World Naked Bike Ride (created in 2004 by Vancouver’s Conrad Schmidt).

And, of course, the Doukhobors. A radical sect of Ukrainian Christians, the Doukhobors (which translates into “spirit wrestlers”) were considered heretics by the Orthodox Church and generally irritated the Russian government. So in 1899 the Doukhobors were encouraged to move their troublemaking to Canada, where they were promised 65 hectares of free land, a bracing climate, equitable laws, peace and prosperity. More than a third of the population (nearly 8,000) said yes, but by 1903 they were unhappy, and an extremist faction called the Sons of Freedom emerged, inspired by the Quakers and Leo Tolstoy. As Carr-Gomm notes, the Sons of Freedom “decided to mount a sustained campaign of protest against the government, whom they believed had reneged on their promises regarding land rights and were enforcing compulsory education in government schools.”

In May of 1903 over 45 Doukhobors protested by marching naked, were charged with “nudism” and sentenced to jail. Naked skirmishes between the Canadian government and the Doukhobors continued into the 1970s.

The Doukhobors were a rare instance of a religious sect demanding political reform through nudity. But there are plenty of historical examples that demonstrate the more purely spiritual aspects of nudity. And given that Carr-Gomm is the author of six different books with the word “druid” in the title (including In the Grove of the Druids and The Druid Way), it’s unsurprising that the spirituality of being in the buff captured his attention.

Druids performed certain rituals naked, or as they called it, sky-clad. Not that the druids had a monopoly on weirdness. As Carr-Gomm notes in a section about folk-magic: “English customs included sweeping a room naked on Midwinter night to then dream of your future husband, entering a lake or river naked at midnight to discover his face revealed on the surface of the water, and undressing at a crossroads on St. George’s night.” (Presumably, if none of these tactics worked, then your future husband was just not that into you.)

But even some Christians have adopted the pioneering work of Adam and Eve and embraced “naturism.” As Carr-Gomm points out, there are Christian Nudist Convocations along with provocatively titled books such as The Naked Christian: What God Sees When He Looks Right Through Me.

Given the general level of permissiveness toward being starkers, even a family newspaper like the Star can publish the Baring Witness women seen here without having to worry about angry mobs rioting outside 1 Yonge St. (Although the paper would go bankrupt if it was forced to pay $550,000 per nipple, which is the fine that CBS received from the Federal Communications Commission for the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction.) Spencer Tunick has built a career out of his photographs of multitudes of naked people posing in public places. And neither Puppetry of the Penis nor the Canadian version of the television show How To Look Good Naked generated much outrage.

To be shocking now requires “supernakedness,” which is how one reviewer described performance artist Annie Sprinkle’s show A Public Cervix Announcement. (The curious should use their imagination to figure out what supernakedness might entail. Or, failing that, consult Google.) As if to acknowledge that the coyness of the traditional nudie calendar is no longer effective or eye-catching, Eizo, a German medical imaging company, released an x-ray pin-up calendar in June. Each month a woman is posed provocatively, but the only thing visible is skeletal structure and high heels. Truly revealing, but not very sexy.

As Carr-Gomm notes, it seems impossible to believe that back in 1945, the BBC’s guide for comedy writers warned against using the word “naked” as a punchline. Today this prudishness is history. At the very least, it allowed humorist David Sedaris to joke about spending a week at nudist trailer park in his 1997 essay collection Naked. “I’ve noticed that when forced to go into town, the costumed nudists appear ornery and uncomfortable, like cats stuffed into little outfits for the sake of a wacky photograph,” he writes. “They claw at their buttons and zippers, their eyes wild and desperate.”

Which is to say that not every nudist has a political agenda. The Baring Witness women might want peace through nudity, but many others go naked only for peace of mind.

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