history – Looking Forward

April 25, 2017

Digital Content For A New Urban Experience

Last week, I posted an overview of a new urban digital experience in the streets of Yonkers, New York.

With the ability to project anything you want on a large wall of a highly-trafficked site or on the ground of the historical center square of a city, how do you kick off something like this?

In this post, I’ll outline the approach we took for the first phase. (Next week, I’ll describe the more interesting and engaging future.)

The two main goals of this project are:

To enhance the street life of the city by offering a new, interesting experience, a new kind of urban design
To entertain, engage, educate and reinforce the image of Yonkers as an historical center of innovation and to inspire the creativity of its current residents

With that in mind, we looked for certain kinds of content. Because many residents of the city and an even larger percentage of visitors know little of its history, we wanted to give them some background. Here are some examples:

We worked initially with the public library to obtain the front page of the main city newspaper of a hundred years ago. In addition to projecting the front page on the wall of the Riverfront Library building, we created a kind of old time radio news summary of that front-page news, sandwiched between appropriate sounding news bulletin music from years ago. Even when there was daylight and the front-page graphic couldn’t be seen, people could still hear the news headlines. As it turns out, with a Presidential election and the onset of America’s entry into World War I, the days’ news from a hundred years ago was pretty interesting.

We also had a variety of short documentaries about the history of the city that were part of a regular weekly program. This included items related to special events. For example, when the annual Yonkers Marathon was run, you could see video of the previous year’s marathon as well as a Pathé news reel about the marathon in the 1930s.
There was footage from a drone.

We also included features about the business of the city, called Made in Yonkers, that enables residents to see inside the buildings that are normally closed to the public and to learn about the interesting things going on. Indeed, this kind of venue allows people to see inside any buildings that are closed – museums that are closed at night can still show their contents. It is also possible to show how a part of the city has changed in the last hundred years or even recently or how it will change in the future – just by overlaying a projection of the past or proposed future.

We identified the great musical artists and other performers who had lived in Yonkers – from WC Handy (of early blues/ragtime), to Gene Krupa (jazz drummer) to the singers Ella Fitzgerald and Steven Tyler (local high school grad and originally lead singer of Aerosmith) to the famed comedian Sid Caesar, among others – and put together shows that informed the public of their work and their relationship to the city.

Then we wanted to celebrate the creativity and artistry of current residents. One of the first organizations to cooperate with this project was the Yonkers Philharmonic. On Wednesday nights, you can see them perform if you’re just walking down the street. You can also hear them many mornings, while you wait for your train.

The relatively new Westchester Center for Jazz and Contemporary Music made an album available.
Similarly, Friday nights are usually devoted to musical shows from the two local theater companies and performances from the schools. Yonkers also runs its own Idol contest and the most recent edition of that is also shown from time to time.
Yonkers, like other cities, runs various festivals during the year – from Friday night Jazz on the waterfront in the summer, to Riverfest that features folk music, to Hispanic and other ethnic group events. The best performances from those are also shown periodically.

As a side note, there is some reassuring about seeing a summer jazz festival
or a flower garden

when it’s the middle of February and the streets still have snow. It cheers you up!

Yonkers is also the home of Sarah Lawrence College and an outpost of Purchase College, both of which are especially strong in the arts. The Westchester Community College also has a branch in the city and its Digital Arts program was an early contributor to the content. These local colleges then provided and even created content especially for this project, including animations, documentary videos and new music.

This is only a partial list. If it had to do with Yonkers, if it happened in the city and helps residents appreciate where they live, then it became part of the content library. That library is still growing.

Visual projections on a big concrete wall are pretty straightforward. For the projections on the ground, the same kind of videos won’t quite work all the time and there more emphasis is given to animations, graphics and text.

Obviously, visual projections are limited to nighttime. But the speakers are on all day. So, there is a program for the morning and evening rush hour – usually a sample of what had been played the night before.

And, for a little fun and to liven up the street, during the middle of the day at random times, pedestrians hear little clips of musical sounds or other ambient sounds, like elephants roaring. Huh? I’m walking in Yonkers and I hear an elephant? That will wake up people who have stopped paying attention to their environment.

From some of the examples I’ve given, you also get the sense of how you can transport people mentally. You can show them what’s happening in a different part of the city. You can show them the sunset from yesterday or the flowers of spring when it’s still winter. All of this can uplift the mood of a city.

Clearly the focus of the content I’ve described was on this city – Yonkers – but any city could do the same. People, even city government folks, were surprised at how much content there was about the city. Your city too has much to show. You just need to look and be a bit creative about it.

But even what I’ve described here doesn’t fully take advantage of the opportunity to create new street experiences. More on that next time.

October 8, 2014

Responses To The Revolution We’re Living Through?

I was recently reading Simon Winchester’s book, “The Men Who United the States: America’s Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible” which was published last year. It’s an interesting exploration of important parts of American history that have gotten lost in the standard renditions or even the standard counter-renditions.

He spends a bit of time on New Harmony, Indiana, Robert Owen’s failed utopian experiment because its establishment enabled the growth of geology and geological exploration in the US, which was an important part of his story.

But the description of New Harmony raised a question in my mind. For those of us who have studied even a basic history of the industrial revolution, we’re aware of various reactions over more than two hundred years.

Just for a few examples … There were the Luddites who tried to stop it. There were the utopian communities, like New Harmony, which hoped to offer an alternative to the way industrialization was occurring – sometimes even using industrial tools, but in new forms of society. Along with that, the Romantic Movement in the arts and the Arts and Crafts movement in the US were a kind of a reaction to industrialization.

The modern corporation was invented in response to the need to somehow manage and then build the industrial revolution’s manufacturing plants.

Marx, of course, developed his critique of capitalism which was the predominant form of economic organization that supported and was supported by the industrial revolution. Later still, governments started to enact various laws to improve labor conditions, reduce monopolies, and provide for the more even distribution of the wealth created by the industrial revolution.

We’ve learned to understand these reactions, see them in context and know which failed and which succeeded. That’s easy with the benefit of hindsight.

Although some parts of the world are still in an industrial transition, as I’ve written in various posts, the more economically advanced societies are now going through a transformation as great as the industrial revolution. We are at the beginning of developing and emerging into a post-industrial society, a knowledge economy, a sharing economy, a digital economy, or something we haven’t coined a name for yet.

So here’s my first question: what responses and reactions to this new economy are we seeing now?

Thinking about the longer term:

Which responses will flame out the way New Harmony did? But what residual benefits will such short-lived responses leave for the rest of this century?
What new laws do we need and really expect to see? Or even new forms of governance?
What new business arrangements do we really expect to see? Will we need to invent something as new in the same way corporations were invented?

Trying to look out over many decades into the future as this new economy develops, I only have some inklings and guesses – but no answers. What are your guesses or boldly stated answers?

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/99484923968/responses-to-the-revolution-were-living-through]

January 17, 2013

What Did People Think Of Old Technologies When They Were New?

As Mark Twain said: “History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme." But I’ve observed before that it seems we lose our sense of history when thinking about new technology.

A good corrective is a 25-year old classic book by University of Pennsylvania Professor Carolyn Marvin. Its title is "When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electronic Communications In The Late Nineteenth Century” and it recalls the days when the telegraph, telephone, even electric lights, were the exciting new technologies.

(Although this post if focused on one aspect, the book as a whole provides a broad-ranging historical view of the interplay of communications technologies and society.)

Here are some excerpts that sound a lot like what we hear now about the Internet, social media, texting, etc.

Concerns About Privacy

She notes how people were worried that “intimate family secrets would be displayed to the world” and ask “How would family members keep personal information to themselves?”

Concerns About Family Breakdown

Harper’s in 1893 felt that “Public amusements increase in splendor and frequency, but private joys grow rare and difficult, and even the capacity for them seems to be withering.”

The Web Brings The World To You

From an 1889 article in the Electrical Review: “the time will come when so far as seeing objects are concerned, one can make a tour of Europe without going out of his own house.”

The Non-Stop News Cycle From Everywhere

From an editor of another magazine: “things [news events] are done in a dozen hours, and in another dozen men are talking … of these great events, not only in Paris and Berlin, but in the mosques of Cairo, … in the shops of Sydney … and at the same instant of time every human heart is quivering with shock of these great events… All corners of the earth are joined, kindled, fused.”

Attitudes Of Some Executives Of The Phone Company

She notes that the Bell Company wasn’t really interested in widespread adoption, but preferred “a limited service at high prices”.

Piracy And Hacking

The magazine, Electrical Review, complained: “The telephone is apparently looked upon as a public convenience, and quite often in smaller cities a single telephone is expected to answer for an entire block”.

Technological Utopianism, Often Attributed To Internet Leaders

She quotes from the Scientific American in 1880 about how the telephone will lead to: “nothing less than a new organization of society – a state of things in which every individual, however secluded, will have at call every other individual”

How The Global Network Leads To Peace And Freedom

She quotes Nicolas Tesla in 1904 about how wireless (radio) communications can be: “efficient in enlightening the masses, particularly in still uncivilized countries”. And his earlier statement: “It is by abolishing all the barriers which separate nations and countries that civilization is best furthered.”

What lessons about new technologies would you draw from the old? How will people think about today’s new technologies a hundred years from now?

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/]

December 1, 2011

Telegraph vs. Internet: Which Had Greater Impact?

2012 is the bicentennial of the War of 1812. You may remember just two things about this period from your high school history class. First, in an act of ignominy for the Americans, the British burned down the capital. Second, the war ended with the resounding defeat of the British by the heroic General Andrew Jackson in January 1815, in what was the war’s only set-piece battle between the opposing sides. Jackson eventually rode this victory into the Presidency.

There is only one problem with this battle. It took place after the war was over. The previous month, in Europe, the two sides had agreed to peace. But in those days, communications was so slow that word of the peace didn’t reach New Orleans until February 1815.

Fast forward, approximately forty-eight years later, to the Civil War. In the period between these two wars, in 1831, Morse thought up the idea for the electronic telegraph. The Union Army had mastered its quick deployment, so that in 1863 while sitting in Washington, President Lincoln could read almost real time reports from the battlefields many miles away.

This was a dramatic increase in the speed of communications. Not all that many decades later, telegraph lines and cables would unite the world. Yet this did not fundamentally change the way people worked or lived or governed themselves.

So consider 2011, when the US Navy Seals got Osama Bin Laden. There was a tweet about helicopters within several minutes, but the author didn’t know why the helicopters were nearby. The first tweet with some confirmation came about forty-five minutes before President Obama made his announcement.

Now think back about forty-eight years before to November 22, 1963 and the assassination of President John Kennedy. The news was out quickly all over television and radio and newspapers. Walter Cronkite famously told the viewers of CBS News that the President had died thirty-eight minutes before.

Unlike the 19^th century examples, there was no dramatic speed up in the reporting of these two more recent events separated by roughly forty-eight years. While we may have more sources of information in more places now than in 1963, word doesn’t get out all that much faster. You could argue that the Telegraph had a greater impact on communications than the Internet.

Yet many of us have the feeling that our world has been changed by this communications. Why is that?

I think it has to do with the changing nature of the work we do. In the mid-19th century, more than three quarters of Americans made things or grew food. In 2011, less than a quarter do so and the rest of us provide services – and increasingly intangible services, including ideas, knowledge, entertainment and the like which is delivered digitally. Because better digital communications directly speeds up the delivery of these services, we see the impact more. It’s the increasing availability of high quality communications, in conjunction with these significant socio-economic trends, which will continue to change our lives.

[picture credit for Battle of New Orleans http://www.frenchcreoles.com/battnozz.jpg]

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