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FRIDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2013 THE VANCOUVER COURIER
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Social media sharing akin to dogs sniffing fence posts
O
n our morning walks, my dog Meika ambles next to me with her nose to the ground, enthusiastically sniffing the canine “blogs” posted on trees, shrubs and fence posts. I imagine the comments, archived in cascading style sheets of urine, go something like this: “Cody was here at 7 a.m.” “Jasper likes this.” “This is Shadow. I just ate some grass.” “Gizmo likes this.” It took millions of years for the ancestors of dogs to evolve their excretory messaging system. It’s taken less than a decade for human beings to start marking digital territory through social networking. There are similarities. Last time I checked into Facebook, woozy with tryptophan from a Thanksgiving dinner earlier in the evening, it was all fenceposts and shrubs. Like leg-lifting pooches, the posters’ central theme seemed to be, “Here I am! Here I am!” I know a few people who post with such obsessive frequency that I can’t imagine them relaxing into their constantly updated outings and holidays. I’m so distractible myself, I very rarely spend time on Mark Zuckerberg’s clock-sucker. A few minutes of surfing his site can turn into several hours of missing time. It’s like a sedentary alien abduction, with Facebook’s tractor beam hijacking your eyeballs and sucking personal information straight through your fingertips. I could go on about how “Total Information Awareness,” the mass surveillance wet dream of Bush-era neocons, has been outsourced to the private world (by design or default), with many of us spying on ourselves voluntarily, right down to the minutest details of our lives. But that cautionary note is about a half decade too late, what with Edward Snowden’s leaks about the NSA’s all-seeing panopticon, and all our noses stuck in wide-open mobile devices. Advances in social networking have moved so fast that Ondi Timinor’s 2009 documentary We Live in Public seems almost quaint now. The film profiles the late ’90s exploits of Internet pioneer and dot-com millionaire Josh Harris. The “Warhol of webcasting” placed more than 100 willing artists in a huge human terrarium under New York City, with multiple webcams constantly tracking their every movement. For weeks, there was no privacy for anyone in this concrete underworld. Wherever they went — to bed, the toilet, the shower — it was all displayed on monitors dotting the underground space. Harris’ disturbing project, called “Quiet: We Live in Public,” was created after he “became interested in controversial human experiments which tested the effects of media and technology on the development of personal identity,” according to an entry in Wikipedia. This included “interrogation artists “trained to psychologically brutalize fellow participants into confessing their most humiliating memories — all on camera. Alcohol and food available were available 24/7 at an 80-foot long dining room table. There was a gun range with a wide selection of arms and ammo available on the floor below. Within weeks, Harris’s underground scene disintegrated into a rat’s nest of interpersonal conflicts. Police, suspecting it to be some kind of millennium cult, shut down the operation on Jan. 1, 2001. As a coda to his designed-to-fail “art experiment,” Harris outfitted his apartment with 30 motion-controlled surveillance cameras and 66 microphones to expose he and his girlfriend to months of 24-hour global ogling on weliveinpublic.com. His Manhattan-based Petri dish of auto-surveillance turned predictably rancid. The girlfriend walked and Harris burned through cash, connections, and any remaining goodwill among potential investors. The former dot-com millionaire decamped to a New England apple farm and then hightailed it to Ethiopia to start anew. His seeming experiments in sociopathy, presumably designed as a warning, predated the explosion of mobile social networking by nearly a decade. “As time goes by we are going to have our lives increasingly exposed in very personal and intimate ways, and we’ll want that to happen,” he prophesied in the film. Today we all live in public, though some attempt to control the exposure wisely through privacy settings and limited online activities. The reason social networking sites are as free as a walk around a park is because the product is you — specifically, your personal information. And with so much hyperlinked treats to sniff out, most of us don’t have the time or the inclination to think about who’s at the other end of the leash. geoffolson.com
GEOFF OLSON
READERS QUESTION LOSS OF BRIGHTON POOL PARKING
To the editor:
Re: “New park poses parking problems for pool users,” Letters, Oct. 9. I agree with Gwen Giesbrecht’s concern over decreased accessibility to New Brighton Pool. With the park board’s predilection for closing outdoor swimming pools (Vancouver is now reduced to three outdoor swimming pools compared to Toronto’s 58 and Winnipeg’s 10), declining usage due to inaccessibility could give them cause to reduce our inventory of outdoor pools even further to the two on the western waterfront — Second Beach and Kitsilano pools. Outdoor swimming is a unique summertime activity that needs to be preserved and enhanced in Vancouver. It’s time for the park board and the City of Vancouver to start investing in these oldfashioned favourites that benefit the entire population’s health and well-being.
Margery Duda, Vancouver Society for Promotion of Outdoor Pools ••• To the editor:
Gwen Giesbrecht’s letter reminded me of my letter to Vision park board commissioner Constance Barnes when this project was put forward. All that Giesbrecht wrote of, I wrote to Barnes. A waste of time, I knew. Vision Vancouver is so anticar that totally inconvenienc-
ing users matters not at all to them. And it may be a strategic move: make the pool inaccessible to most of the users and the numbers will fall, and then the pool can be shut down and the area resurrected as a garden for flowers and kale, perhaps. But Vancouver has to become the greenest city in the world, eh — not the second greenest, the greenest.
Mike Tropp, Vancouver
danger issues for children playing. As a Kits Point resident, I’m strongly opposed to the plan and can’t imagine why there was no consultation with the neighbourhood. Jason A. John, Vancouver
LEFT-TURN BAYS WORK FINE To the editor:
KITS BEACH BIKE PATH LOCATION ALL WRONG To the editor:
A11
Re: Kits Beach bike path a done deal,” Oct 16. I’m a Kits Point resident and I am shocked we knew nothing about the proposal. While I support bike lanes, I can’t support tearing up of precious green space on a beach where families come to barbeque and where kids throw footballs, Frisbees, play volley ball or just run around and play. The proposed location is dangerous to park users who are mostly pedestrians. The lane goes directly through popular picnic areas. It is amazing to me that the council that wants Vancouver to be the greenest city on earth would support such a ridiculous plan. My 13-year-old keeps asking how such a plan could be approved when it goes against all the things she has been learning at school. Even she can see the potential new
Re: “Loss of parking on W. 4th worries shop owners,” Oct. 9. I fail to see why business owners at Fourth and Macdonald are worried about the installation of left-turn lanes. Several other intersections in the city, such as 49th and Fraser, Victoria and 41st, and Main and King Edward have a similar lack of parking to make room for left-turn lanes, and all have vibrant and lively retail activity. Derek Cheung, Vancouver ••• To the editor:
You know the worst spot on Fourth Avenue for congestion is the westbound Fourth turn onto southbound Alma. Macdonald is an issue, but wouldn’t it be a compromise to have left turn signals? This city council is making a hell of a mess on our city streets in their zeal to accommodate the cyclists. Would those spots near PC Galore et al be removed if they were metered parking? Probably not. Lynn Perry, Vancouver
ON YOUR MIND ONLINE COURIER STORY: “Oakridge: Open House,” Oct. 13 Michelle Lim: Only in Vancouver (or possibly San Francisco). I think I watch House Hunters on HGTV just to prove to myself that in any other North American city for half a million bucks you can have a really nice home. Honestly I worry about where my kids will settle down & am not convinced it is Vancouver. I bet the house shown in this article gets torn down (tiki bar and all) and a new monster home replaces it. Kidd Karrim: Houses like these were the beauty of the Oakridge area. Low and ranchy. Not invasive to the horizon. Aaron Chapman: I’m impressed that it had its own Tiki Bar though. I state “had” because I suspect the new owner who bought the home for 1.73 million isn’t interested in Polynesian kitsch, and it’ll soon be gutted for a 5.1 surround sound theatre. If it were up to me, it’d at least be a Surround Sound Tiki Bar. COURIER STORY: “12th & Cambie: COPE says Vision Vancouver to blame for homeless increases,” Oct. 9 Ryan McLaughlin: Contrary to popular belief, increasing the amount of available housing shouldn’t increase housing prices. Prices rise when a lot of people want something and there isn’t enough of it. Developments increase the amount of that something. Not everything has to be an ‘us or them’ type issue. The developers can make money while supplying housing for the people who need it. Unless you suggest some kind of Cuban, centrally planned system for providing housing, the best way to reduce housing prices is by allowing developers to develop and even (dare I say it?) compete with one another. Derek: The influx of homeless will prevent this problem from ever being “solved.” It can only be managed. This is just one of Vision’s many idealistic and unrealistic goals. Civic government should be focused on the basics of running the city and they definitely should not be ripping up infrastructure. Vision must go.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
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