Flutterby™! : Maps, personalization and subversion

Slate: My Map or Yours? Google’;s plan to personalize maps could end public space as we know it.

This might seem liberating and empowering—;that, at any rate, is how Google wants us to see this new development. “;In the past,”; reads the company's announcement, “;a map was just a map, and you got the same one for New York City, whether you were searching for the Empire State Building or the coffee shop down the street. What if, instead, you had a map that’;s unique to you, always adapting to the task you want to perform right this minute?”;

And then, of course, goes into the usual pearl-clutching that we've become so used to from newspaper editors about how personalization is going to create separated spaces and isolated silos of interests and all of that, but...

I've been a bit thinking recently about the need for deliberate cultural transgression. After the weekend at the Stumptown Stomp two weekends ago, and this weekend at the straight square dancing Golden State Roundup, we were forwarded a "what to expect at the IAGSDC international convention" that we're going to in July. The fascinating lore of that led me to reading a bit of the history of the International Association of Gay Square Dance Clubs (in the form of the Ten Years IAGSDC Digital Edition), which goes into some of the struggles of gay square dancing in the '80s, trying to find CALLERLAB callers who'd take the social risk of calling for a gay club, trying to convince hotels that they weren't going to get cooties from the attendees, and so forth.

And we've had some talks with folks at our club, Redwood Rainbows, about the struggles of making gay square dancing attractive to straight people (fears that "...and spank the bottom!" as a response to the call "Fan The Top" might drive people off), about the conflicts between the gay clubs rejuvenating interest in resources like Wischemann Hall and the traditionalism from the people who built this resource hating that "the queers" are invading those spaces (Redwood Rainbows was apparently formed in 2007(!), as a sub-group of "Saucy Squares", and just in those six years has become the caretakers of the hall and the source of all of the new blood, and now accounts for nearly all the active members, but there's a lot of delicacy over the relationship between those clubs).

So keeping a culture fresh and relevant requires pioneers, deliberate transgressors, people who are willing to step outside the social frameworks and say "what else is there out there?"

I suspect that in the future of scanning all of your social media and personalizing your news and maps and advertising, we'll have to have carefully partitioned alternate identities through which we can discover the holes and gaps in the culture, and the ways which we can subvert the resources of the mainstream to create new and vibrant cultures to replace the ones which will, inevitably, ossify and die.