Scientists will tell you that Mother Nature abhors a vacuum. Artist Hiroshi Sunairi has learned that she also has little tolerance for war.
On August 6th, 1945 an atomic bomb called Little Boy was dropped on the city of Hiroshima, Japan.
With a force equivalent to 13 kilotons of TNT, the blast leveled nearly 5 square miles. It is estimated that at least 140,000 people died as a direct result of the bombing.
Pictures of the scene taken after the bomb was detonated above the city show the only things left standing: a few stray buildings and some trees.
These Hibaku (”bomb survivor”) trees are now part of an art project by Sunairi. After a trip to Hiroshima in March of 2006, he brought back some seeds and seedlings and gave them out to friends and young children in NY.
In 2008, Sunairi was given a few packets of seeds from an arborist in Hiroshima. The packets contained seeds for Round Leaf Holly, Persimmon, Chinaberry, Chinese Parasol, Japanese Hackberry and Jujube trees. Sunairi decided to mail these seeds across the globe to people who were willing to document the progress of the seedlings. You can track the progress of the seedlings on the project blog, on Vimeo (at the top of this post), on Flickr and on Facebook. (There’s even one in my hometown of Providence, RI.)
In December of this year, a collection of the seedlings will be on display at the Horticultural Society of New York.
How amazing to see the ancestors of such devastating destruction take root around the globe. I’m emailing Hiroshi right now to request mine. I’ve the perfect spot picked out for a persimmon.
For years, many people have been saying the Internet will be a “great social equalizer.” Give everyone access to technology, and differences in race, class, and income will give way to a stronger democracy, right? Not necessarily, says Net researcher danah boyd.
Speaking at this week’s Personal Democracy Forum in New York, boyd said that even among people with access to the Net, long-held social divisions of race, class, and income are starting to play out online, particularly among teens now starting to choose which social network they prefer, MySpace or Facebook. “Social media don’t eradicate social divisions,” says boyd, an expert in NextGen behaviors for Microsoft and a senior fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. “[Social media are] making the old social divisions obvious in totally new ways.”
Consider the perception in the media that MySpace is losing its rivalry with Facebook, boyd says. The numbers tell a different story. ComScore data released two weeks ago show the two social networks running neck-in-neck with about 70 million unique users each, boyd said. So why the disconnect? boyd, who has spent the last four years traveling the United States and talking to teens about their use of social media, says it probably has something to do with how MySpace is being perceived by teens in society.
boyd said it used to be that most kids were on both MySpace and Facebook, but then, during the 2006-2007 school year, boyd started noticing a trend: teens were beginning to decide whether to stay with MySpace or jump to Facebook—and increasingly, they were making that choice based on the social categories in which they placed themselves offline. “Increasingly,” says boyd,” (teens) were choosing the site that reflected who they saw as being ‘people like me’ and seeing the ‘other site’ as the place where the ‘other’ people go.”
Here’s one quote from a teen she interviewed, Anastasia, 17, from New York:
“My school is divided into the ‘honors kids,’ the ‘good not-so-honors kids,’ ‘wangstas,’ (boyd says “they pretend to be tough and black but when you live in a suburb in Westchester you can’t claim much ‘hood”), the ‘latinos/hispanics,’ (boyd says “they tend to band together even though they could fit into any other groups”) and the ‘emo kids’ (whose lives, boyd says, “are always filled with woe”). We were all in MySpace with our own little social networks but when Facebook opened its doors to high schoolers, guess who moved and guess who stayed behind?… The first two groups were the first to go and then the ‘wangstas’ split with half of them on Facebook and the rest on MySpace… I shifted with the rest of my school to Facebook and it became the place where the ‘honors kids’ got together and discussed how they were procrastinating over their next AP English essay.”
Teens also started making the choices based on perceived values, tastes, and social positions, boyd said. Here’s an excerpt from boyd’s interview with Craig, 17, from California:
“The higher castes of high school moved to Facebook. It was more cultured, and less cheesy. The lower class usually were content to stick to MySpace. Any high school student who has a Facebook will tell you that MySpace users are more likely to be barely educated and obnoxious. Like Peet’s is more cultured than Starbucks, and Jazz is more cultured than bubblegum pop, and like Macs are more cultured than PC’s, Facebook is of a cooler caliber than MySpace.”
But here’s what boyd says should really “scare the hell out of us.” As teens choose one site over the other, she said, “it’s clear that it’s not just anyone” who leaves MySpace goes to Facebook. “What we’re seeing is a modern incarnation of white flight,” boyd says.
“Whites were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. The educated were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. Those from wealthier backgrounds were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. Those from the suburbs were more likely to leave or choose Facebook. …Those who deserted MySpace did so by choice but their decision to do so was wrapped up in their connections to others, in their belief that a more peaceful, quiet, less-public space would be more idyllic.”
And one more thing? “In looking through my data,” boyd says, “I found that teens who prefer Facebook are far more likely to be condescending towards those who use MySpace than vice versa… Teens who use MySpace may (consider) teen Facebook users as ‘stuck-ups’ or ‘goodie two-shoes’ or the ‘good kids.’ But they’re not nearly as harsh in their language as Facebook users are of those who use MySpace.” And only last month, boyd says, she was doing field work in Atlanta where she found a heavy usage of MySpace “among certain groups of youth. They knew of Facebook but had no interest in leaving MySpace to join Facebook.”
Bottom line, says boyd? Facebook and MySpace are divided by race, class, education and other factors “that need to be addressed.” Says boyd: “…When people are structurally divided, they do not share space with one another and they do not communicate with one another, which can and does breed intolerance.”
Further, says boyd, social network sites are not like email, where it doesn’t matter if you’re on Hotmail or Yahoo. When you choose MySpace or Facebook, she says, “you can’t send message to people on the other site. You can’t ‘friend’ people on the other site. There’s a cultural wall between users…and if there’s no way for people to communicate across the divide, you can never expect them to do so.”
But perhaps most significantly, says boyd, it’s not just about social divisions. What happens when institutions and politicians start favoring one side over the other, skewing their favor to the privileged over those who are not? “In many ways, the Internet is providing a Next-Generation public sphere but unfortunately, it is also bringing with it Next-Generation divides,” boyd said. And those divides are not just about race and class. They also inform how many people view the world at large.
“In your world,” boyd told the mostly white, college-educated, over-40 PDF crowd, “Iran probably matters more than Michael Jackson right now. But don’t for a second think this is universal…While the Net has enabled many new voices to jump into the political fray, not everyone is sitting at the table.”
“…If we don’t address this head on,” boyd concludes, “inequality will develop deeper roots that will further cement the divisions in our lives.”
For more on boyd’s survey work about teens and their use of social media, see her blog. Her research papers are listed at danah.org/papers. Another resource is Eszter Hargittai’s article, “Whose Space? Differences Among Users and Non-Users of Social Network Sites.”
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Nice, attention-grabbing title for a blog post, isn’t it? Hat tip to my friend Stephan Trueby, an architectural and design critic, who pointed me to The Garden of Cosmic Speculation, a thirty acre private garden in the Borders area of Scotland created by architect and architectural critic Charles Jencks. It is a joining of terrestrial nature with fundamental concepts of modern physics (quantum mechanics, super-string theory, complexity theory, etc.), and the literal and physical manifestation of the craftsman as philosopher, re-uniting the “head and hand divided” (Richard Sennett).
The garden is also a book, and Jencks writes:
“When you design a garden, it raises basic questions. What is nature, how do we fit into it, and how should we shape it where we can, both physically and visually? Some of these questions are practical, others are philosophical, and the latter may not occur to us while laying out a garden, but they are implied. When in 1988 I started designing a garden with my wife Maggie Keswick, at her mother’s house in Scotland, we were not concerned with the larger issues, but over the years, they came more and more to the fore. The result has been what I have called ‘The Garden of Cosmic Speculation.’ The reason for this unusual title is that we - Maggie, I, scientists, and then friends that we consulted - have used it as a spur to think about and celebrate some fundamental aspects of nature. Many of these are quite normal to a garden: planting suitable species which are both a pleasure to eat and easy to grow in a wet, temperate climate. And others are unusual: inventing new waveforms, linear twists and a new grammar of landscape design to bring out the basic elements of nature that recent science has found to underlie the cosmos.”
Want to get closer to Daniel Craig, Prince William or the Dalai Lama? How about a big green warty frog? The Prince Charles Rainforest Project is working to draw attention to the issue of deforestation of the planet’s rainforests and they’ve called in some Very Famous Friends to help them. With their new “frog message” video tool, you can now record a short video message that guest stars the PCR’s mascot, a 3D CGI digitally animated frog, then send a copy to your friends via a number of social media channels. The videos are posted on a gallery on the site.
The Prince’s Rainforst Project was established in 2007 by Prince Charles “to promote awareness of the urgent need to take action against tropical deforestation”.
“If deforestation can be stopped in its tracks, then we will be able to buy ourselves some much-needed time to build the low carbon economies on which our futures depend. I have endeavoured to create a global public, private and NGO partnership to discover an innovative means of halting tropical deforestation. Success would literally transform the situation for our children and grandchildren and for every species on the planet.” - HRH The Prince of Wales
There’s also a cool section for schools where teachers, parents and kids can learn more about rainforests and find related activities, lesson plans, contests and more. The hands-on guides are a great way to educate and help create the next generation of environmental activists.
I’m pleased to report that the frog message video tool is kid-tested, kid-approved. What kid doesn’t want to be in a video with a frog? Kermit my green friend, you’ve done your job well.
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