Some thoughts on the Twitter expansion

January 5, 2016

01/05/201601/05/2016 · Martin Kelley

Twitter has always been a company that succeeds despite its leadership. Many of its landmark featured started as hacks by users. Its first apps were all created by third-party designers, whose good will to the curb when it about-faced and killed most of them by restricted its API. Top-down features like Twitter Music have come and gone. The only interesting grassroots innovation of recent years has been users using image attachments as a way of going past the 140 character limit.

I’ve been getting less patient with Twitter in recent months. Then-CEO Dick Costello acknowledged their failure handling abusive situations early in 2015 but nothing much seems to have changed. Having co-founder Jack Dorsey come back this in Jobsian fashion has been encouraging but only to a point — there’s a lot of weird ego involved in it all. Twitter’s inability to promote diversity and the tone-deafness of hiring a white man as diversity chief last month makes me wonder if it’s just finally going to do a full Yahoo and implode in slow motion.

But today something new: we’re looking at doing away with the 140 character limit. My initial reaction was horror but if done well it could be interesting. I’ve always wondered why they didn’t partner with blogging platform Medium (founded by another co-founder, featuring similar core principles). The key will be keeping the feed at 2 – 3 lines so we can scan it quickly, with some sort of button or link to expand past 140 or so characters.

One could argue that these “fatter tweets” is Twitter’s way of building the popular long-text picture hack into the system. Could Twitter management be ready to look at users as co-creators of the wider Twitter culture?

From concern to action in a few short months

July 1, 2015

07/01/201507/02/2015 · Martin Kelley

A growing list of stories is suggesting that black churches in the South are being targeted for arson once again (although one of the more publicized cases seems to be lightning-related). This was a big concern in the mid-1990s, a time when a Quaker program stepped up to give Friends the chance to travel to the South to help rebuild. From a 1996 Friends Journal editorial:

Sometimes a news article touches the heart and moves people to reach out to one another in unexpected ways. So it was this winter when the Washington Post published a piece on the rash of fires that have destroyed black churches in the South in recent months… When Friend Harold B. Confer, executive director of Washington Quaker Workcamps, saw the article, he decided to do something about it. After a series of phone calls, he and two colleagues accepted an invitation to travel to western Alabama and see the fire damage for themselves. They were warmly received by the pastors and congregations of the three Greene County churches. Upon their return, they set to work on a plan.

I’m not sure whether Confer’s plan is the right template to follow this time, but it’s a great story because it shows the importance of having a strong grassroots Quaker ecosystem. I don’t believe the Washington Quaker Workcamps were ever a particularly well-funded project. But by 1996 they had been running for ten years and had built up credibility, a following, and the ability to cross cultural lines in the name of service. The smaller organizational size meant that a newspaper article could prompt a flurry of phone calls and visits and a fully-realized program opportunity in a remarkably short amount of time.

A first-hand account of the workcamps by Kim Roberts was published later than year, Rebuilding Churches in Rural Alabama: One Volunteer’s Experience. The D.C.-based workcamp program continues in modified form to this day as the William Penn Quaker Workcamps.

Update: another picture from 1996 Alabama, this time from one of my wife Julie’s old photo books. She’s second from the left at the bottom, part of the longer-stay contingent that Roberts mentions.

Can we count the ways that the McKinney video is messed up?

June 9, 2015

06/09/201508/31/2015 · Martin Kelley

When the McKinney video started trending I wasn’t in a state to watch so I read the commentary. Now that I have, the whole thing is completely messed up but at least three parts especially unnerve me:

The completely unnecessary commando-style dive-and-roll that introduces Corporal Eric Casebolt. Some reports describe it as a trip but to me it looks like he’s playing a Hollywood action hero stunt double. Has he just been watching too many of the police videos he’s been collecting on YouTube?
That none of the other officers saw his derring-do and said “yo Eric, stand down.” Is this something cops just don’t do? And if not, why not? We all know what it’s like to be hopped up on too much adrenaline. I know people do weird stuff when their reptilian brain fight-or-flight mechanism cuts in. It seems that officers should be on the lookout for just this sort of overreaction and have some sort of safe word to tell one another to take a chill.
The videographer was a “invisible” white teenager. He walked nearby – and occasionally through – the action without being questioned. At one point Casebolt seems to purposefully step around him to put down his dark-skinned friends. The videographer told news reporters that he felt his whiteness made him invisible to Casebolt.

I never quite realized all the race politics behind the switch from public pools vs private pool clubs. I grew up in a Philly suburb with two public pools and very much remember the constant worry that Philadelphia kids might sneak in (“Philadelphia” was of course code for “black”). The township did have a historically African American neighborhood so the pools were racially integrated but I’m sure every dark-skinned township resident was asked to show town ID a lot more than I was. And it’s hard to think it was entirely coincidental that both public pools were located on the opposite ends of the township from the black neighborhood.

There are no public pools in the South Jersey town where I live. A satellite view picks out thirteen private pools on my block alone. Thirteen?!? There’s one private pool club across town. There’s a lot of casual racism around here, primarily directed at the mostly-Mexican farmworkers who double the town population every summer. If there was a town pool that reflected the demographics of the local Walmart parking lot on a Friday night in July, we’d have mini-riots I’m sure — which is almost surely why we don’t have a municipal pool and why wealthy families have poured millions of dollars into backyards.

(My family has joined the Elmer Swim Club, a pool located about half an hour away. While the majority of members are super nice and I haven’t heard any dodgy racial code phrases. The pool is diverse but is mostly white, reflecting the nearby population. That said, I’ve read enough Ta-Nehisi Coates to know we can rarely take white towns for granted. So.)

What could have been: a review of Hitchcock’s flawed Torn Curtain

May 11, 2015

05/11/201511/10/2016 · Martin Kelley

I recently listened to Alec Baldwin’s podcast interview of Julie Andrews and thought I misheard when she mentions working on a movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The effect was only heightened when she mentioned that her co-star was Paul Newman. Although I could do the math and realize the careers of these three legends would overlap, the younger stars seemed to come from a different era. Julie Andrews especially seemed a million miles from the ubiquitous icy blondes of Hitchcock’s later movies.

The movie is 1966’s Torn Curtain. The plot is driven by a classic Hitchcock MacGuffin: a suspense story where we don’t fully understand (or even care about) the objective over which everyone’s fighting. In this case it’s a formula for some sort of anti-missile defense rocket, something called the Gamma Five (umm, sure Hitch, whatever you say).

There’s a rare alchemy needed to cast famous stars in dramatic roles. Do it right and the stardom melts into the character. Hitchcock can pull it off. We love watching a surprisingly complex Cary Grant in North by Northwest, partly because so much of his later comedic acting had becoming self-referential (he was almost always playing Cary Grant playing a character). Somehow Hitchcock used Grant’s familiarity to turn him into a quick-witted modern Everyman with whom the audience could identify.

But the magic doesn’t work in Torn Curtain. From the moment I heard Andrews’ familiar chirpy clipped voice from under the bedcovers I wondered why Mary Poppins was engaging in post-coital pillow talk with The Hustler. I could not muster enough belief suspension to see Paul Newman as a brilliant math nerd and I certainly couldn’t imagine him as a lover to prim and fussy Julie Andrews.

The story revolves around personal and national betrayal and defection but we never really understood why Newman’s Michael Armstrong would defect or why (as we later learn) he has gone into a kind of freelance espionage behind the Iron Curtain. The defection of practically perfect Julie Andrews, who as Sarah Sherman we now know to be particularly determined and loyal, feels even more inexplicable. As I watched the movie bounce aimlessly from one close call to another my mind drifted away to imagine the Hollywood board room where some mogul or another must have strong-armed Hitchcock to cast two up and coming stars for roles which they didn’t really fit.

Then the plot. It meanders. But even more damningly, it focused on the wrong lead. Newman’s Michael Armstrong is predictably linear in his objectives. The most interesting plot turns all come from his assistant/fiancée, Andrews’ Sarah Sherman. She is full of pluck and intelligence. It’s Sherman who insists on coming along on the initial cruise to Copenhagen and it’s her sharp eyes that spot the mysterious actions that tip off the coming betrayals. She notices Armstrong’s tickets, picks up the mysterious book, ferrets out the true destination, and then has the chutzpah to board an East Berlin flight to follow her lying and erratic boyfriend. Her tenacious improvisation reminded me more of Grant in North by Northwest than anything Newman did.

There are some intriguing scenes. The struggle with Gromek in the farmhouse is fascinating in its length and has the kind of brilliantly bizarre camera angles that could only come from Hitchcock. The theater scene was legitimately nail-biting (though I found myself imagining Cary Grant ’s face as he realized how hopeless their escape had become). One of the most mesmerizing scenes was the bus chase — will they have to stop for a passenger?!? It’s the the kind of Hitchcock twist we all love.

After reading the spoilers from WIkipedia and IMDB, I see that many of my complaints have good sources.

The basic plot was Hitchcock’s idea, inspired by husband/wife defectors Donald and Melinda Maclean and In the fall of 1964, Hitchcock unsuccessfully asked Vladimir Nabokov to write the screenplay.
The original focus was on the female lead (I was right!) The first screenplay was written by Brian Moore, a screenwriter known for strong female characters. After Hitchcock critiqued the script and hired new writers, Moore accused him of having “a profound ignorance of human motivation.”
For casting, Hitchcock had originally wanted to reunite North by Northwest’s Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint. Grant told him he was too old; Hitchcock then approached Anthony Perkins. But…
Lew Wassermann was the Hollywood exec who insisted on bankable stars. Hitchcock didn’t feel they were right for the roles and he begrudged their astronomical salaries and constrained schedules. How is it that Alfred Hitchcock hadn’t secured total control over his projects at the point in his career?
The actors and directors were indeed from different eras: Newman’s method acting didn’t fit Hitchcock’s old school directing style. Hitchcock used his casts as chess pieces and expected the directing and editing to drive his films. When Newman pressed the director for Armstrong’s motivation, Hitchcock reportedly replied “motivation is your salary” (can’t you just hear him saying that in his famously arch tone?)
Hitchcock didn’t like the way the movie was unfolding and shifted the attention to Newman’s character part-way through. It’s always a bad idea to tinker with something so fundamental so late in the game.

I think Julie Andrews could have stepped up to the challenge of acting as the main protagonist. If Hitchcock had treated her as the Cary Grant “Everyman” character — and made Newman stand in as the dumb blonde! — it would have brilliantly turned Hitchcock on his head. As it is, this movie rates a middling “meh” rating, more interesting for what it could have been than for what it was.

Looking locally at the Underground Railroad

February 28, 2015

02/28/201504/19/2018 · Martin Kelley

It seems like we’re undergoing some reassessment in terms of the Underground Railroad. A piece appearing in yesterday’s New York Times, “Myth, Reality and the Underground Railroad” by Ethan J Kytle and Carl Geissert, tell one narrative tells the story of one of the primary myth-makers of the 1890s:

Although Siebert tempered some of his contemporaries’ hyperbole, he nonetheless took many Underground Railroad stories at face value. Undaunted by a dearth of antebellum documentation — most railroad activists had not kept records in order to protect runaways and themselves — Siebert relied on the reminiscences of “‘old time’ abolitionists” to fill “the gaps in the real history of the Underground Railroad.”

An article in last month’s Times explains that this story got the revisionist treatment in the 1960s:

That view largely held among scholars until 1961, when the historian Larry Gara published “The Liberty Line,” a slashing revisionist study that dismissed the Underground Railroad as a myth and argued that most fugitive slaves escaped at their own initiative, with little help from organized abolitionists. Scholarship on the topic all but dried up, as historians more generally emphasized the agency of African-Americans in claiming their own freedom.

That article focuses on Eric Foner, who’s just come out with a book that you might call a post-revisionist history, based on some recently-uncovered documents by little-known 19th-century abolitionist editor named Sydney Howard Gay. It’s on my to-read list. It’s nice to have some new documentary evidence, as it sometimes seems the Underground Railroad is the proverbial blank slate upon which we project our contemporary politics.

I’m currently reading “Philadelphia Quakers and the Antislavery Movement” by Brian Temple, an amateur South Jersey historian. It’s a useful lens. There are a handful of crazy cool stories of white Quakers, but it’s clear that much of the Quaker involvement is pointing runaways to the nearest African American town. But that’s where it gets interesting for me. So many of these towns seem to be on land sold them by a white Quaker farmer; they’re just a mile or two from a Quaker town, down a quiet secondary road where you can see anyone coming, alongside deep woods or marshes into which runaways can easily disappear.

It seems like one of the most important Quaker contribution to the Underground Railroad in South Jersey was participating in the founding of these towns: places where manumitted and self-freed African Americans could live in a self-governing and self-defensible community.

This raises lots of questions. There was one prominent South Jersey African American Quaker but he was the exception. And it’s often forgotten, but much of the source of Quakers’ wealth (the land they had to sell) was war and previous enslavement. But still, it seems like there might have been something resembling reparations going on here: forty acres and a mule and giving the freed Africans the space to minister their own churches and govern their own town. The historic black towns of South Jersey would make a great thesis for some hardworking grad student.

The racial politics of the twentieth century have not been kind to these towns (Ta-Nehisi Coates could write a new chapter of Case for Reparations based on them). Highways planners looking for routes close to the now-historic Quaker towns drew their lines right through the towns. Since most were never formally incorporated, zoning and school board battles with their surrounding township have taken away much of their autonomy. Many have been swallowed whole by mid-century sprawl and towns in more rural areas have depopulated. An old church is often the only visible remnant and sometimes there’s not even that.

My reading has stalled three-quarters of the way through Temple’s book and I’ve missed a few opportunities to see him present it locally. But I’ll try to finish and give a more comprehensive review in the near future.

A comeback of personal blogging?

September 3, 2014

09/03/201404/19/2018 · Martin Kelley

There’s some pieces making the round to the effect that some of the old school NYC bloggers are coming back to blogging. From Fred Wilson, The Personal Blog:

There is something about the personal blog, yourname.com, where you control everything and get to do whatever the hell pleases you. There is something about linking to one of those blogs and then saying something. It’s like having a conversation in public with each other. This is how blogging was in the early days. And this is how blogging is today, if you want it to be.

Wilson cites Lockard Steele in Back to the Blog:

Back then, we’d had a ton of stupid fun linking to each other’s blog posts for no other reason than that they existed and that it amused us greatly. Who wouldn’t want back in on that?

Another one of his citations was Elizabeth Spiers, who followed up with a post Anything I Care About:

I don’t have to write as narrowly as I do when I publish in a regular media outlet. The upside of that for me is that I don’t feel compelled to stick to a particular topic. I can write about, as Fred put it, “anything I care about.”

One of my first thoughts is how annoyingly insider these posts feel. One of the qualities about the current internet is that our filtering mechanisms are so sophisticated and transparent that we don’t always see how self-selected a sliver of social media we’re seeing. Facebook and its mysterious algorithms are the example we all like to complain about. But Twitter is a different beast depending on who you follow and Google searches use hundreds of different signals to tailor results. Just because your cohort all stopped personal blogging in exchange for professionalized blogs ten years ago doesn’t mean it’s a universal phenomenon.

Whenever someone says they’re starting (or restarting) a blog I like to wait a few months before celebrating, as there’s a big difference between intent and actual writing. But I like the idea that personal blogs might be making a comeback among some of what we used to call the digerati.

But let’s not get too snobby about domains: how are Facebook posts not a personal blog? Is it just a matter of URLs? I have Facebook friends who put care into their online persona. People use Facebook and Tumblr and Instagram partly because they come with built-in audiences — but also because their crackerjack engineers have taken away the friction of blogging. When Wilson decided to experiment with this nouveau-blogging, he photoblogged a trip to his WordPress site. What happened? The photos were all oversized. One of the commenters asked Wilson “isn’t this a bit similar to what you’re already posting on Tumblr and Foursquare?” Well, yeah.

Anyway, all this is to say that I’ve blogged a lot more since I decided to make my Tumblr my personal blog. I’ve got the near-frictionless posting that keeps my photoblogging looking good but I’ve maintain the controlled URL of martinkelley.com to future proof against new technological platforms. But is it just the URL that makes it a personal blog?

What does it mean to be a Quaker?

September 2, 2014

09/02/201407/30/2015 · Martin Kelley

Craig Barnett tries to define Friends:

“I want to suggest that there is a living tradition of spiritual teaching and practice that makes up the Quaker Way, which is not defined by a particular social group, behavioural norms, or even values and beliefs.”

As usual Craig clearly articulates his premise: that Friends have become something of a content-less, lowest-common-denominator group that fears making belief statements that some of our membership would object to.

I agree with most of his analysis, though I would add some pieces. I don’t think one can understand what it means to be a Quaker today without looking at different types of definitions. Belief and practices is one part but so is self-identification (which is not necessarily membership). We are who we are but we also aren’t. There’s a deeper reality in not being able to separate Quaker philosophy from the people who are Quaker.

In this light, I do wish that Craig hadn’t resorted to using the jargony “Quaker Way” ten times in a short piece. For those who haven’t gotten the memo, liberal Friends are no longer supposed to say “Quakerism” (which implies a tradition and practice that is not necessarily the denominator of our member’s individual theologies) but instead use the vaguer “Quaker Way.” In my observation, it’s mostly a bureaucratic preference: we want to imply there is substance but don’t want to actually name it for fear of starting a fight. Contentless language has become its own art form, one that can suck the air out of robust discussions. A truly-vital living tradition should be able to speak in different accents.

Quaker Folkways and Being Patterns on the Interwebs

October 25, 2013

10/25/201312/13/2013 · Martin Kelley

Last Sunday I have a presentation to Haddonfield (N.J.) Meeting’s adult First-day school class about “Sharing the Good News with Social Media.” As I prepared I found I was less and less interested in the techniques of Facebook, etc., than I was in how outreach has historically worked for Friends.

For an early, short, period Quakers were so in-your-face and notorious that they could draw a crowd just by walking a few miles up the road to the next town. More recently, we’ve attracted newcomers as much by the example of our lives than by any outreach campaign. When I talk to adult newcomers, they often cite some Quaker example in their lives – a favorite teacher or delightfully eccentric aunt.

People can sense when there’s something of greater life in the way we approach our work, friendships, and families. Let me be the first in line to say I’m horribly imperfect. But there are Quaker techniques and values and folkways that are guides to genuinely good ways to live in the world. There’s nothing exclusively Quaker about them (indeed, most come from careful reading of the Gospels and Paul’s letters), but they are tools our religious community has emphasized and into which we’ve helped each other live more fully.

In the last fifteen years, the ways Friends are known has undergone a radical transformation. The Internet has made us incredibly easy to find and research. This is a mixed blessing as it means others are defining who we are. Careful corporate discernment conducted through long-developed techniques of Quaker process are no match for the “edit” button in Wikipedia or some commercial site with good page rank.

That said, I think people still are discovering Friends through personal examples. George Fox told us to be patterns and examples in the world and to answer that of God in everyone. A lot of our exampling and answering today is going to be on the threaded comments of Facebook and Twitter. What will they find? Do we use Facebook like everyone else, trolling, spamming, engaging in flame wars, focusing on ourselves? Or do Quaker folkways still apply. Here are some questions that I regularly wrestle with:

When I use social media, am I being open, public, and transparent?
Am I careful to share that which is good and eternal rather than titillating for its own sake?
Do I remember that the Good News is simply something we borrow to share and that the Inward Christ needs to do the final delivery into hearts?
Do I pray for those I disagree with? Do I practice holding my tongue when my motivation is anger or jealousy?

What struggles do others face? What might be our online folkways?

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