infobong.com the absurd courts the vulgar

The FCC is holding a public hearing in Austin tomorrow night to gather public input about media ownership policy. The FCC is reviewing its limits on how many media outlets a given corporation can own in a particular market city. Both of my readers will remember that the 1996 Communications Act loosened radio ownership rules and allowed organizations like Clear Channel and Infinity Broadcasting (now CBS) to dominate the airwaves. Further relaxation has only accelerated the ability of major corporations to shift away from serving local interests toward homogenized national programming.

The commissioner attending the hearing, Jonathan Adelstein, is one of the more liberal commissioners in a body that often rubber-stamps the desires of the major telco and media players, so speakers concerned about localism and corporate control will have a sympathetic audience. I’m not sure I’ll make any comments in person, but I’ll certainly attend out of scholarly and personal interest. If you’re interested in testifying, there are tips here.

The hearing will take place in Jester Auditorium on the UT-Austin campus. (Jester is the big, honkin’ dorm at 21st and Speedway; just take the bus to 21st and Guadalupe, rather than worry about parking.) There will be an “educational” presentation at 5:30, followed by the hearing at 6:30. I imagine it will go on for hours.

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The Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization (CAMPO) is conducting a survey online to gauge the sentiments of Austin area residents about future growth and transportation planning. After reading Mike Dahmus’s post on consensus and data collection, I don’t know how CAMPO uses this data, but I’d encourage Austin readers to fill out the survey. (Unless, of course, you’re in favor of more sprawl and banning bikes from the streets.) The survey has only eight questions, so it shouldn’t take up too much of your time.

Much of the survey asks about “mixed-use activity centers” or hot zones around the region where mixed development is taking place. While I support the idea in theory, the existing locations they cite are hardly green. In the comments, I wrote, “Many of these activity centers such as Tech Ridge and Round Rock are not bike- or bus-friendly. Although they centralize development, activity centers should emphasize non-automobile traffic and promote transportation via bicycle and bus.” As Nigel points out, the “post-Ballardian nightmare” Tech Ridge requires “a Tahoe to get from one end of the SuperTarget to the other.” It’s difficult to park at one store in that “mixed-use activity center” and walk to another, not only because of the scale of the store, but because of the reckless drivers in the parking lot and the architecture of the parking lot itself. It hardly seems like a “mixed-used” development if you need a car to go from one store to the next in the same shopping center. I certainly hope that Tech Ridge is not a model for future Austin development.

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Living in the capital of Texas, I’m often annoyed by the misuse of the word “capitol.” Were the folks at Capitol Chevrolet absent that day in third grade when the teacher informed them that “capitol” refers to buildings while “capital” refers to cities and money? I’m not in the market to buy a car, but their poor word choice hardly makes me want to shop with them.

I guess this mistake is easy to make. A group of five designers honored this year in the National Design Awards declined an invitation to a White House breakfast in their honor. They cited the Bush adminstration’s use of design and language to distort facts as a reason to skip the event. They asked fellow designer Chip Kidd to join them in their protest, who refused. Although he shared the opinions of the designers, he said that the event was about design, not politics, adding “We were invited to recognize the National Design Awards, in our nation’s capitol, in an extraordinary building that is a cornerstone of our history.” After reading this, I tried to imagine the White House stuffed inside our nation’s capitol, but it’s clear that Kidd — whom I respect and admire — really meant “capital.”

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I just took a survey about Texas prisons for the Texas State Department of Criminal Justice’s sunset review process. Many of the questions were pretty revealing about the Texas prison system. The first question asked, “Currently, prisoners cannot have food, clothing, jewelry, and toiletries mailed to them by anyone, nor can they receive books, magazines, and newspapers unless mailed by the publisher. What do you feel prisoners should have direct access to through the mail?” While I can certainly understand why prison adminstrators would want to restrict clothing and jewelry deliveries, of course I think prisoners should have free access to media. I wonder how the volunteer project Inside Books is able to fulfill prisoner requests for books; perhaps they have a special exemption.

Another question asked about the accomodations given to prisoners for visitation. One of the options was “Notice to family prior to visitation of potential unavailability of prisoner (e.g.: prisoner is in administrative segregation).” Good lord, the correctional adminstrators don’t inform family member’s their loved ones are in lockup, punishing them by driving out to the pen for no reason? I don’t expect correctional workers to be very cool, but that’s just indecent.

Anyway, the survey is active until June 1, 2006, and I’d encourage any readers interested in Texas justice to take it.

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Steev pointed out that nearly all of the definitions for “Indymedia” on Urban Dictionary accuse the project of being anti-semitic or are otherwise dismissive. Today, I checked the site, and found a definition that better reflects how participants view the project while addressing the accusations of anti-semitism. Now that I notice the date on Steev’s blog entry, I realized that one of his readers may have written it, but I’d encourage readers to vote it higher in the stack.

I probably last checked Urban Dictionary when Steev posted that entry. I don’t remember it offering an interface for posting definitions to del.icio.us. (It’s kind of buried under an Ajaxamacated “email this” link.) I’ve seen a lot of sites add del.icio.us links, which seems like a good strategy for attracting geeks, but it’s interesting how the site allows you to bookmark (they need a better word) individual definitions, rather than the entire page that may contain many crappy definitions.

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Steev has a post titled, “Is Your Child a Tagger?” I was disappointed to learn it wasn’t about parental fears over folksonomy but instead about graffiti. He points to this amusing graphic taken from a California newspaper and comments about the hysteria the media often create over youth culture.

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OK, this might be the story I’d give a media studies person if they asked about this whole Web 2.0 nonsense. Tim O’Reilly’s canonical piece is great, but it’s a little too utopian and a little too geeky for the folks in my department. This piece is good at de-mystifying the buzzword, neatly summarizing the concept by saying “the open standards of the web are being repackaged as Web 2.0 for a Wall Street audience.” It’s great that the article points out that Web 2.0 is seen primarily from a business perspective, but I do think that “the read-write Web” has a lot of potential for producing participatory media.

I suppose Indymedia was an effort to bring this concept to activists, but it seems to be a bit of a failure. It’s non-activist audience seems to consist of right-wingers interested in taking quotes out of context to make disingenuous generalizations about liberals and leftists - six years later, Indymedia no longer seems to have the potential to reach new audiences. It’s become more of an Internet version of Deep Dish TV, a distribution system for documentaries for sympathetic audiences. I wonder what an Indymedia 2.0 would look like.

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