memory

RT @spitzenprodukte: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. Then they co-opt you, then they rewrite your struggle.
Twitter  23 June 2013 | LINK | Filed in
RT @annegalloway: #Bees can remember human faces, but only if they are tricked into thinking that we are strange flowers. http://harpers.org/findings?search=Bees
Twitter  21 March 2013 | LINK | Filed in
Twitter  1 February 2013 | LINK | Filed in
RT @jcutbirth: Times revises Koch obituary to report "hundreds" of New Yorkers sick of dying of AIDS in the 80s. The number is actually closer to 30,000.
Twitter  1 February 2013 | LINK | Filed in , ,
China erases architectural / internet symbol of defiance.
china-house
Twitter  1 December 2012 | LINK | Filed in , , ,

Myths and Movements

From Big Books and Social Movements: A Myth of Ideas and Social Change (PDF) by David Meyer and Deana Rohlinger:

“Mythic accounts shorten the incubation time of social movements and omit the initiating efforts of government and political organizations. The myths develop and persist because they allow interested actors to package and contain a movement’s origins, explicitly suggesting that broad social dynamics replicate idealized individual conversion stories. They also allow actors to edit out complicated histories that could compromise the legitimacy of a movement or a set of policy reforms. These mythic accounts spread and persist because they simplify complicated social processes and offer analogues to the individual process of becoming active, but they may lead us to misunderstand the past and make misjudgments about collective action and social change in the future. We consider those implications and call for more research on the construction of myths about the past.”


It should be no surprise that nuance is lost as histories become narratives become myths, or that interested actors construct stories about past events to serve their current purposes. But then while simplified myths can be useful rallying points, I’m surprised how often some movement clichés come up — and how hard they are to dislodge.

>  26 October 2012 | LINK | Filed in
Across the gallery, a postminimalist pile of steel rebar… from collapsed schools of Sichuan, carefully straightened.
Straight
Via NY Times on Ai Weiwei
Twitter  12 October 2012 | LINK | Filed in
9/11 memorial explores what happened and to whom—a touching, sensitive collective witness—but does not help understand why. #changebydesign
Twitter  25 June 2012 | LINK | Filed in ,

The End of Print

Green Book Statue

Few visuals capture the spirit of regime change as much as toppling the monuments of the previous regime. In the case of Libya, revolutionary protesters on YouTube topple a monument to Muammar al-Qaddafi’s revolutionary Green Book.

The future is unwritten!

>  24 February 2011 | LINK | Filed in , , ,



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