Of Canines and Civics

Theolog has a post by Amy Frykholm about dog parks in which the author suggests that dog parks foster community in American neighborhoods in a way that nothing else at the present time does. She quotes Robert Putnam and the whole "Bowling Alone" argument that civic engagement in America is rapidly deteriorating. And while she anticipates that people of Putnam's persuasion will hardly be moved by what's on offer at the dog park, she's compelled to see in it something quite significant.

Here's a money quote:

Over the three years that [my friend] has been visiting the dog park, my friend has become close with a lesbian couple and their Scotch Terrier. They arrange meetings at the dog park and invite each other over for dinner. The dogs like each other, and gradually, the humans have gained each other’s trust. They ask each other for help when they need it; they invite each other to significant events. They’ve built a small, fragile community.

Trust. Reciprocity: these are two of the things that make up Putnam's ideal of "Social Capital." They're precisely the things that Frykholm sees emerging among the gaggle of mutt-lovers congregating daily in their fenced-in playpen.

Maybe I should get a dog.

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It's Gotta Be The Shoes

NPH is probably behind the curve here, but we've only now just learned about TOMS shoes (thanks to a tip from Cool People Care). Started by 30 year old Blake MyCoskie--a former Amazing Race contestant--the shoe company donates one pair of its Alpargata shoes to a needy child for each pair that it sells. MyCoskie got the idea when he was in Argentina. This is what his website says:

Inspired by a traditional Argentine shoe and challenged by the continent's poverty and health issues, I created TOMS with a singular mission: To make life more comfortable. TOMS accomplishes this through its unique shoe and my commitment to match every pair purchased with a donated pair to a child in need . . . no complicated formulas. You buy a pair of shoes and I give a pair to a child on your behalf.

NPH thinks this is brilliant. We looked it up, and there's a local shoe store where we can get these. We're all over it.

Here's the trend we're noticing: charitable donations on behalf of consumers. Like the Product Red campaign, TOMS doesn't ask affluent western consumers to do anything other than what they're already doing, namely shopping and consuming. But it's the ultimate if-you-can't-beat-'em-join-'em strategy, where you make their consumption into a vehicle for good work. This is the entrepreneurial innovation the world needs more of.

Read more about TOMS shoes here and here.

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Politics and The Internet

BuzzMachine takes up a new report by the Pew Internet And American Life Project in which the 2006 mid-term elections are analyzed in terms of the role of the internet. Read the full report here. Here's the article abstract:

Twice as many Americans used the internet as their primary source of news about the 2006 campaign compared with the most recent mid-term election in 2002.

Some 15% of all American adults say the internet was the place where they got most of their campaign news during the election, up from 7% in the mid-term election of 2002.

A post-election survey shows that the 2006 race also produced a notable class of online political activists. Some 23% of those who used the internet for political purposes – the people we call campaign internet users – actually created or forwarded online original political commentary or politically-related videos.

What NPH finds most interesting about this is the new content being created and distributed. That internet video technology allows people to have a more active role in the political process, even if it means simply being the guy holding the camera when George Allen utters a racial epithet.

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Technology and Disconnection

Here's a piece in which two of NPH's areas of interest, global media and civil society, converge. Jenny Uechi wrote it for Adbusters, and it asks some difficult questions about the proliferation of communication technology and the concomitant decrease in civic and social involvement among the populace. To avoid generalizing, Uechi draws upon a study that was done at Washington University and funded by major communications corporations 10 years ago. She summarizes the findings like this: "While most first-time users went online for social purposes, the studies showed a rapid decline in participation for social activities beyond the net and increases in depression and loneliness."

Further, she cites a Duke University study conducted last year posited that "the average American today only has two close confidants," and SwissCom Inc. "found that 80 percent of all cell phone conversations took place with only four people."

NPH thinks there is something qualitatively different about face-to-face interaction and that which is mediated through a a mechanical device (a computer or cell phone). And while many argue that the two forms of communication are just "different," we have to think that the former is better--much better--than the latter, and if the latter is allowed to phase out the former democracy is in big trouble (it may be in bigger trouble than we think right now).

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Audio of Rushkoff Interview

Doug Rushkoff was interviewed and answered calls on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show about his Christmas Eve run in with a mugger in front of his home in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn. Now, NPH doesn't live anywhere near Brooklyn or anywhere near New York, but this is a really interesting conversation Rushkoff has unearthed. Listen to the interview here (scroll down to "Brute Market Force").

What's most interesting to NPH about it is the amount of self-interested criticism Rushkoff has received from his neighbors for writing and speaking about the incident. "You're hurting our property values," they're telling him. So rather than creating a dialogue with his fellow citizens about crime and their responsibility to respond to it, he's elicited annoyance and fear from them because of what the financial implications might be of actually talking openly about the problem.

NPH (who is not a property owner) has to surmise that this is citizenship in the 21st century: looking out for one another's property value.

We recently expressed a guarded optimism about the development going on in the urban core of the Heartland city otherwise known as NPH-ville. NPH does what any self -respecting white person with a degree in the humanities from a liberal arts college has to do: we wring our hands over "gentrification." And this is why. Rushkoff sums up what has happened in his Brooklyn neighborhood like this, quoting what the police officer who responded to his mugging said to him: "You've taken a whole bunch of rich white people and put them smack on top of a poor neighborhood, and . . . that neighborhood is still there; all the criminals are still there. It's still the city. That's all."

Our idyllic city is experiencing a boom of condo and loft development in formerly depressed urban areas, and it's "rich white people" who can afford to pay the mortgages and the rents for those properties (NPH and the missus looked at some of them on a lark and gawkingly backed away). What's going to happen to all those people that developers and the city are trying to attract to those properties when they realize that "It's still the city?" Rushkoff takes it with a good dose of resignation, even ribbing himself for the fact that he got caught up in the market hype of it all. But most people won't take it like that. Most people will "want something done" about "the criminal element."

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Revolving Radio

Over two years ago NPH lamented the death of a quality radio station where he lives. 97.3 The Planet had its format switched, due to low ratings, from an indie rock type to an all-out rocker type, even though they left The Planet up online. They changed the stations name from "The Planet" to "Max FM" and took the tagline, "Everything That Rocks."

More like sucks rocks.

Well, now its changing again. Parent company Union Broadcasting is switching it to an FM sports talk station, enlisting ESPN Radio as its purveyor. This will make the third sports station that Union owns in the Kansas City market, as they also run Hot Talk 1510 (another ESPN affiliate) and 810 WHB on the am dial, a station that has a great local following and has even started its own restaurant.

NPH likes this. Union is a locally owned media company that has been very successful, and if their fm station isn't going to work as a music station, then we'd rather it broadcast something that it knows how to do well.

Interestingly, the station's Wikipedia entry already has this as written history, even though it just happened two days ago. I wonder if a Union Broadcasting employee wrote that . . .

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Another NPH First

This spring NPH will vote in his first mayoral election. Ever. We've never cast a ballot for mayor in any of the cities we've lived in, simply because we've never actually lived someplace when that place was electing a mayor. NPH will keep his readers thoroughly apprised of the campaign events, signs, phone calls, and fliers as we encounter them.

Walking down Main street in midtown this morning, we walked past Joe Joe's Italian Eatery, where a huddled group of people were gathered, and where a KCTV 5 news crew was standing around outside. As we walked past the building, we looked back over our shoulder to see a massive sign reading, "Do you shop at Costco? Thank Jim Glover. Glover for Mayor." So there you go. Kansas City Councilman Jim Glover is running for Mayor, and he's launching his campaign on the compelling premise that the he's the man who brought us Costco. What NPH had stumbled upon was the ribbon cutting ceremony for his new campaign headquarters.

Pardon NPH for not being riveted.

There's a Home Depot on the same lot as the Costco. Is Glover not taking credit for it? Surely the urban retail complex that Glover advocated and helped to realize has helped the city (it's on a plot that NPH used to walk past all the time back in the day, when it was just an abandoned lot). But putting the retail chain Costco in your campaign slogo? That's just lame. And the picture on his website looks like an ad for the store, not a picture of a compelling candidate.

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Good Stuff, I Mean Good Local Stuff

While NPH's wife is out the country, some good friends are keeping him company and allowing him to spend exorbitant amounts of time on their couch, eating their food, watching their bigscreen, and playing with their baby.

On Tuesday night, as dinner cooked, we took a jaunt to the local hardware store to copy some keys. We couldn't resist the temptation to duck inside the bookstore next to the hardware store, one that we'd both driven past several times but never, as yet, patronized. Why'd we wait so long?

At the Half Price book store in Westport NPH picked up a cheap used copy of a cd that another local blogger had recommended and a $10 Random House edition of W.H. Auden's Longer Poems (including "For The Time Being"). But the real event was finding a copy of Douglas Rushkoff's Coercion and, well, coercing our friend to buy it. We were looking for Get Back in The Box, but couldn't find it, so NPH was tickled to find Coercion. It's the first Rushkoff book we ever read, and it remains required media literacy reading to his mind.

That a copy of it is now in the hands of our brilliant friend can only mean good things for the world.

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