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Sitting Out

Posted on Friday, May 9, 2014 by • No comments yet

By Georgia Lewis

As a child in the 1940s, I enjoyed lazy summer days playing on our big breezy front porch, in the downtown immigrant neighborhood of Buffalo where we lived.  In the evening, Mom, Dad and Yiayia, my Greek grandmother, would come out, too. They’d sit on the porch in their white wicker chairs, just like all the other families on our street, visiting back and forth with the neighbors on their porches, all new to the country, sharing gossip and (when we were lucky) sharing wonderful ethnic pastries they’d baked earlier in the day, while the kids played street games. That was when I was a little girl.

In Amherst, the upscale suburb where we moved when I was a teenager, it wasn’t quite the same.  There we sat out on patios in back, in Adirondack-style chairs behind hedges and fences.  There were no sidewalks and passers-by because everyone drove. You issued invitations if you wanted the company of friends.

Later, when I’d grown up and gone away, my parents moved to a second floor flat a bit closer to the city.  In that neighborhood they hauled their folding aluminum chairs out into the driveway and watched the traffic go by.  They got their neighbors to do the same and once again enjoyed the informal, daily banter of friends reviewing the day.  When they eventually rented an apartment back in the city, they’d sit out on their tiny balcony overlooking a parking lot, calling hello to the few passersby they knew.

Mom said that when she was a girl people would sit out on summer evenings around the fountain in a downtown park, which was actually just an island in the street. It was cooler than their crowded upstairs apartments.  On really hot nights, if there was a breeze, they stayed all night and slept there, outside, without fear.

In Potomac, Maryland, the Washington, DC suburb where I lived for 40 years, where my children grew up, houses are air conditioned. People rarely venture outside during the muggy Maryland summers.  When they do, they use backyard patios and decks where it’s quiet and private. Instead of congregating in parks, each family has its own playground equipment in its own yard. Busy and driven, neither the adults nor the children are home much so they don’t really know their neighbors very well. They don’t mingle. They know nothing of street games and porch culture.

Once, when sirens wailed and stopped a few doors down from us it turned out to be a devastating teenage suicide–people discreetly kept their distance. My mother, who was visiting at the time, was incredulous.  She expected everyone on the block to rush over to find out what happened.  To her, it seemed rude not to, as if we didn’t care.  To my neighbors, it would have been rude to intrude on a private tragedy.

I learned where my family’s sitting out custom came from when I went to Greece.  There it’s called “peripate”, which taken literally means the opposite of sitting–“walking around”.  Perhaps it began as walking around to visit in the evening but evolved into more sitting as time went by.  Or maybe the younger folks would promenade as the older ones sat.  At any rate, the purpose is to mingle.

In Greece every town has a square, which may or may not be an actual square-shaped space.  What’s important is not the shape but that it be a space large enough for people to congregate.  In Sparti, a town of perhaps 15,000, it is a real square, bordered by the town hall on one side and various shops, outdoor restaurants and cafenios (coffee houses) on the rest. People of all ages meet and mingle from dusk “˜til midnight.  Children ride bikes and play, teenagers hang out and adults eat at the outdoor cafes. You can take an hour negotiating a meal for the group, family style.  You can sit at the table with a cup of coffee for hours and not feel pressured to move on and let the place make higher profits. The owner might even join you.

In Klada, my grandmother’s birthplace, population 250, the “square” is simply the end of a street that’s been widened a bit.  A few chairs in front of a small taverna define it.  And in Paraloggi, my father’s birthplace, a tiny village at the top of a mountain, a stone wall at the village entrance serves as the square. The night we drove up to Paraloggi at dusk we were greeted by two dozen weathered-looking men and women, some barefoot children, a donkey and two collie dogs gathered at the wall.

Searching for relatives in these villages, we would arrive at dusk when people were sitting out, and ask if there were any Macherases or Kalogereses or Demopouloses left. We’d be invited to sit and have some juice. We’d be asked about the USA, my children, my parents, my visit, if my daughters were married, if I had grandchildren.  We’d learn about their families, too, and any possible connections they had to anyone anyplace in the USA. Our question about my relatives was incidental to the opportunity to visit. You can’t be in a hurry in Greece.

Sitting out is just one of many signs of the communal culture that is Greece. For example, the subway seats face each other, encouraging communication.  Shopping is a social experience.  On entering a shop, you are expected to chat with the clerk and on leaving you exchange polite good wishes. And the huge stone amphitheatres of ancient times are still used for performances, providing another way for people of all ages to congregate.

A favorite shared pastime in Greece, another form of sitting out, is gathering to watch the sun set. This happens everywhere in the cities, in the mountains, by the sea, on the ships.  People congregate in a spot with a good view and chat while they wait for the show.  After the sun sinks, they applaud as if watching the curtain drop on an opera or ballet.

Thinking about these spectacular Mediterranean sunsets and the time it takes to properly enjoy them, I contrast the culture of my origin with the American one, the culture of rugged individualism that tells us we can do anything, be anything, own anything, if we work hard enough and compete fiercely enough. The culture that says we must learn to hurry, multitask, be efficient, get ahead.  The culture that tells us not to just sit around with friends and neighbors and watch the sun set.

It takes time to live a communal life, to connect with other people. It happens in places where people value live conversation during long, leisurely meals.  Where people don’t arrange the furniture to face the TV and watch talk shows, but instead arrange the furniture to face and talk to each other.  Where people have friendly conversations before conducting business. Where people gather to watch the sun set and clap when it sinks slowly into the sea.  Where people think it’s fine to simply sit out together and do nothing at all.

Now that I’m retired I’ve been thinking about these things, about the value of sunsets and front porches. Being mostly American, I didn’t take the time before. The Greek in me seems to be emerging in my later years.  My downtown Bethesda condo faces West and if I sit out on my fourth floor balcony I can often see a lovely, if not spectacular, sunset.

Year-end look at hyperlocal big boys

Posted on Wednesday, December 22, 2010 by • No comments yet

Peter Krasilovsky offers a year-end look ahead at the WalMart approach to hyperlocal news…

… there is a rap out there that hyperlocal doesn’t scale and these [Patch and Fwix] are toys.  Is it still the case?

Patch now has a local presence in 600 communities, with editorial and sales “pods” of 12 each Some of being run by longtime newspaper industry leaders. Last Sunday, LA Times media columnist James Rainey wrote that Patch is revitalizing local journalism and asserted that may have become THE place for journalists to go (aside from wages of $35k-$50k, or half the salary that big city journalists might have gotten from the big metro, if they were hiring).

Patch President Warren Webster… didn’t dispute my characterization of Patch as an experiment that wants to quickly get a national footprint to attract national, regional and local advertisers; create a business directory that goes beyond the Yellow Pages; and scale editorial and sales resources.

On a macro-level, local ad revenues typically split 50/50 between targeted national and local. For Webster (and cohorts), the bet is that Patch is poised to do both. They’ve publicly said they were spending $50 million to ramp it up in 2010…

Peter offers this list of horses in the race, grouped in an interesting way…

National/regional “hyperlocal” news sites

Local editorial and sales
Patch
Main Street Connect
Hello Metro
TBD.org

Geographic aggregation for media partners
Topix
Outside.in
Fwix
Datasphere
Everyblock

Local event and news sites
AmericanTowns.com
Center’d
DiscoverOurTown

Aggregators also supported by unique user-generated content and pro/amateur content farms
Examiner.com
Associated Content
Demand Media
Helium
Merchant Circle

Cooperation vs. Competion or Regulation

Posted on Monday, March 22, 2010 by • No comments yet

Scott Heiferman’s tweet led me to take a closer look at the work of recent Nobel Laureate (economics) Elinor Ostrom.  She studies how cooperation works best in some cases… better than competition or regulation… our two dominant forms of organizing markets.  From a Forbes article…

Garrett Hardin called his famous 1968 essay on shared resources “The Tragedy of the Commons.” He argued that a shared village grazing pasture would tend to get overused and eventually destroyed. But even Hardin later acknowledged that shared common resources did not inevitably have to end in destruction, saying that he should have called his essay “The Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons.”

And from Fran Korton’s interview at Shareable…

Fran: It’s interesting that your research is about people learning to cooperate…

Elinor: I have a new book coming out in May entitled Working Together, written with Amy Poteete and Marco Janssen. It is on collective actions in the commons. What we’re talking about is how people work together. We’ve used an immense array of different methods to look at this question “case studies, including my own dissertation and Amy’s work, modeling, experiments, large-scale statistical work. We show how people use multiple methods to work together.

Fran: Many people associate “the commons” with Garrett Hardin’s famous essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons.”… What’s the difference between your perspective and Hardin’s?

Elinor: Well, I don’t see the human as hopeless. There’s a general tendency to presume people just act for short-term profit. But anyone who knows about small-town businesses and how people in a community relate to one another realizes that many of those decisions are not just for profit and that humans do try to organize and solve problems.

If you are in a fishery or have a pasture and you know your family’s long-term benefit is that you don’t destroy it, and if you can talk with the other people who use that resource, then you may well figure out rules that fit that local setting and organize to enforce them. But if the community doesn’t have a good way of communicating with each other or the costs of self-organization are too high, then they won’t organize, and there will be failures.

Fran: So, are you saying that Hardin is sometimes right?

Elinor: Yes. People say I disproved him, and I come back and say “No, that’s not right. I’ve not disproved him. I’ve shown that his assertion that common property will always be degraded is wrong.” But he was addressing a problem of considerable significance that we need to take seriously. It’s just that he went too far. He said people could never manage the commons well.

At the Workshop we’ve done experiments where we create an artificial form of common property such as an imaginary fishery or pasture, and we bring people into a lab and have them make decisions about that property. When we don’t allow any communication among the players, then they overharvest [the commons]. But when people can communicate, particularly on a face-to-face basis, and say, “Well, gee, how about if we do this? How about we do that?” Then they can come to an agreement.

That last bit there about communication leading to better community decisions… love it.  It’s so obvious. I guess that’s why it takes a non-economist Nobel Laureate in Economics to explain it to the economists of the world.  And, for what it’s worth, her observation jibes with what we see at Front Porch Forum too.  FPF leads to better communication among neighbors, more face-to-face conversation, and, in many cases, better community decisions.

Congratulations Dr. Ostrom!

Facebook money-making challenge

Posted on Monday, June 29, 2009 by • No comments yet

An interesting piece by Bernard Lunn on Read Write Web recently.  In part…

… the thought that kept coming back to me is that Facebook’s bravado, its “grand vision” talk, is what you would expect from a concept-level startup. Surely by now, about 6 years into its venture, Facebook should show some substance? It is time to deliver some real financial results. The concept-level talk is great for attracting capital and talent. Facebook has done that brilliantly. But the point of attracting capital and talent is to be able to generate financial results.

Anybody who criticizes Facebook’s financial results gets accused of being small-minded, of missing the point, of (gasp!) “not getting it.” In digerati circles, not getting it is like having body odor. Facebook is changing the world, they say. It is a new form of communication, akin to the printing press. Once you get to scale, profits always follow. Google created a service without knowing how to monetize it.

In fact, far too much money has been invested (in both Facebook and hundreds of “me too” ventures) based on that one premise, that “Google created a service without knowing how to monetize it.” The statement is true. If it had not devised the AdWords revenue model, Google would perhaps have sold some kind of enterprise search technology to Fortune 500 companies and rented banner ads on its home page. With AdWords, it found the perfect native revenue model for search, meeting two contradictory needs at the same time:

  1. Do not irritate or interrupt the user, and even occasionally add value for the user.
  2. Provide a compelling value proposition to paying customers.

The problem is that Facebook does not seem to have a clue how to do that. Google did not wait 6 years to unveil AdWords, and when it did unveil it, revenue and profit took off like a rocket. Facebook keeps trying. But to date, its attempts look weak and subject to diminishing returns.

There is a world of difference between increasing returns (what Google gets) and diminishing returns (what Facebook gets with its current strategy). That one-word difference equals billions of dollars.

… Facebook’s revolutionary alternative is to allow consumers to invite brands to communicate with them, like we used to invite companies to send us emails. That would get over-used and spammy in a heartbeat. Highly innovative brands would do well, as they always do in a new medium, but the law of diminishing returns would apply. By the time this model scaled, and it would have to if Facebook wants to move the revenue needle, users will have switched off in droves.

These are the diminishing returns. The more the model scales, the more it will irritate users, and the more users will switch off, and the sooner growth will slow down and reverse. As with email, Facebook can “make up for this with volume.” But unlike with email, which is virtually free, Facebook has to pay money to serve each user.

Sorry, “Coca-Cola wants to be your friend” is in no way an enduring revenue model. If it sounds phony, maybe that is because it is phony.

The one lesson from social media marketing is that authenticity matters. What no one has shown — and methinks this would be impossible — is how to scale authenticity.

This is where behavioral marketing supposedly comes in. Wired calls this the “third rail of Internet marketing.” … Or, as Wired puts it, “As the Beacon debacle showed, there is a fine line between ‘targeted and useful’ and ‘creepy and stalkerish’ — and so far, not enough advertisers have been willing to walk that line.”

Facebook talks a great game about helping the world to communicate. It tries to sound like a group of benevolent revolutionaries. But then it turns to really old-fashioned tools to make money. Its basic message to marketers seems to be, “We have ’em locked in. Yep, Google can’t see them, so we are the only way to get to them. And not only that, we can tell you what every one of them is doing and saying right now. Step right up, folks!”

The one thing that Facebook has on its side is trust. Users trust the company with their real identities. That is massive. Break that trust and bye-bye.

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Ghost of Midnight is an online journal about fostering community within neighborhoods, with a special focus on Front Porch Forum (FPF). My wife, Valerie, and I founded FPF in 2006... read more

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