Monthly Archives: February 2014

This Just In

Facebook released a new app yesterday, and it’s awesome.

Recently, representatives of Facebook described the website as an aggregation of content shared by your connections, in essence a personal newspaper or magazine. The new app, Paper, uses that concept and takes it to an entirely different level. It combines stories from your news feed, articles and pieces of content into one elegant interface. The outside content is selected by choosing various tabs based on subjects and interests, in the same way that Pulse or Flipbook does. In this instance however, Facebook limits the number of tabs you can select, which makes you think about the content you want to see, rather than just seeing everything.

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I played with it all day yesterday, and I’m sold. Facebook making apps is awesome, and I’m much more hopeful for this avenue than the HTC First debacle. Facebook is meant to be used on all operating systems, not to be the operating system.

What Sparks Our Fire: A news aggregator that’s not only functional, but very nice to look at and interact with.

Will you use Paper as your new news site?

The Neighborhood’s Going Downhill

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Apparently grungy is in. You have your reclaimed wood tables, exposed brick walls, and raw metal beams, all of which add to a certain aesthetic and serve to add a certain hip-ness to the area. Now, according to sociologist Gordon Douglas, a certain amount of graffiti can contribute to the gentrification of a neighborhood.

Long the symptom or result of economic malaise or poverty, graffiti has a predominately negative connotation. According to Douglas “A huge amount of social science throws [graffiti] into a camp of being a sign of crime and disorder.” Baruch College sociologist Gregory Snyder compared rates of violent crime versus graffiti and found that places with more tagging had lower rates of crime. In his book Graffiti Lives, he writes that in SoHo, “residents, tourists, and high-end boutiques, co-exist with graffiti vandalism in a relatively symbiotic fashion.” He claims graffiti-ed neighborhoods “[attract] the type of urban ‘cool’ consumer marketers call ‘taste makers’ and advertisers and retailers so desperately want to reach.”

So that’s probably not an excuse to tag any old wall, but in a world where the works of artists like Banksy can command prices of $100,000, this kind of organic street art may just attract the kind of people that gradually gentrify neighborhoods.

What Sparks Our Fire: The shifting perceptions of what is art vs. vandalism and how the public as a whole reacts to it.

Do you feel graffiti adds to the je ne sais quoi of a neighborhood?