Middlesex Marquee (again)

[jd-science.livejournal.com]

I just sent the following to the Middlesex Bank. I also e-mailed Rebekah about it. Does anyone else ever notice this trend on the marquee but me? It's annoying and depressing.


Hello-

I sent a comment on June 27, 2006 about the scrolling marquee outside your bank. I have not yet heard a response.

This is what I sent you then:

"I live in the Davis Square area and wanted to express my unhappiness with the new scrolling marquee above your bank. This weekend I was sitting in the square with some friends, and within five minutes we saw the words "death" and "kill" repeated several times. This does not seem appropriate at all for large, bright broadcasting in the middle of Davis Square.

I realize that the marquee was just scrolling news headlines, but I don't believe that news headlines - particularly those types of headlines - are really that important to building a truly informed public and in fact contribute to a destructive social atmosphere. If the marquee must be there (which I don't think it great, but I understand you've probably put a lot of money into it), I'd prefer it just to scroll the time, temperature, and maybe sports scores. And please nothing about death, killing, children being bombed, and so forth. We can get enough of that everywhere else."

Today, August 3, I was eating lunch in the square at around 1 pm, and one right after the other, I saw the following headlines scroll across, multiple times:

Iranian Woman Awaits Death By Stoning
New Surgical Procedure for Incontinence
Woman Afraid of Height Dies in Plane Crash
Israeli Bombing Kills 7
Welcome to Davis Square

There was another headline after the stoning that had something to do with death, but I don't exactly remember what it said.

This hardly seems appropriate to be displayed in large orange letters in the middle of Davis Square. Death, destruction, ridiculousness, and hey! Welcome to Davis!

I went into the bank to ask who to talk to about my issues with the sign, and the tellers told me Mr. Smoliss (?) was in charge. I asked if I could talk to him, and they said, “Well, his office is upstairs.” I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to just walk up and there and knock on the door, so I am writing via the official channel on your website.

At the recent Davis Square Task Force meeting, it was noted that the sign is only allowed, by law, to display the time, temperature, and public service announcements. The president also said he wanted the sign to promote community events and activities.

(for notes, see http://community.livejournal.com/davis_square/565301.html)

It hardly seems that what I saw today is in line with any of this. In addition, after all these useless, dramatic headlines were several about mergers and business acquisitions, also not of local community interest.

I would appreciate a response from you about this problem.

Comments

[hauntmeister.livejournal.com]

This is a rather long posting. Could you put most of it in an lj-cut, please?

[xuth.livejournal.com]

Can someone please explain to me why there are people who will go around and ask people to put a posting that is entirely text and entirely safe for work behind an lj cut? Why are people fanatical about this? I don't see the big deal.

[on-reserve.livejournal.com]

I don't understand the lj cut police either!

[two-stabs.livejournal.com]

X3

[ron_newman]

So that it doesn't take up half of your Friends page, if you read it that way.

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

What, scrolling down a screen is too hard?

[ron_newman]

I think more so that people don't have to hit Next Page over and over again only to see just one or two posts on each page. (Which is what would happen if everyone posted long messages without lj-cuts.)

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

I don't see that as a problem. I really don't. Given the layouts many people use that lose all but 30% of the width of their screen for actual content - which I find insane, but hey - I'm not alone.

If the content was wide enough to break whatever percentage of LJ layouts can't handle wide content, I'd support the request. If there was an image likely to get you in trouble at work, maybe (or maybe you shouldn't be reading LJ at work, as you never know what's going to be behind that very cut you requested).

But for text? I can page down.

[jadelennox]

yes, it is. Many people (including me) use accessibility software, large fonts for impaired vision, or limited size displays such as blackberries or cellular phones. Putting something behind a cut is just polite, and I appreciate that the original poster responded politely to the request and was not goaded by all the people who found a polite request to be inappropriate and worthy of sarcasm. A well phrased cut tag means people who are interested in the content behind the cut can follow the link, and those who aren't don't have to see it. Since it didn't bother the original poster, I don't see why it bothers you.

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

I agree. LJ-Cuts mainly mean I'm less likely to read the content.

[hauntmeister.livejournal.com]

I work under the assumption that if it's too much effort for a reader to click on the lj-cut link, that reader isn't particularly interested in the topic.

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

I don't. Most people don't, from what I've read.

[ah42.livejournal.com]

It's a form of LJ netiquette. AFAIK, it's nothing new, either.

[leighjen.livejournal.com]

The straight forward answer is that the Community rules state that long posts must go under a cut, even if they are just long text posts.

[xuth.livejournal.com]

And the straight forward response to that is "Why is that a part of the 'Community' rules?". I was just looking for a reason.

[komos.livejournal.com]

And the simple answer was that they were agreed upon so we didn't have to have a draconian moderator policing our butts.

Ah, the good old days...

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

Define 'long'? As long as it's left to interpretation, we'll have these arguments. It's under 3k. That's not long to me.

Then
again
if
it
were
all
typed
like
this,
or,
gods
forbid,
l
i
k
e

t
h
i
s
,
200 byes can be long, too.

[hauntmeister.livejournal.com]

Y
o
u

m
a
y

m
e
a
s
u
r
e

p
o
s
t
s

i
n

b
y
t
e
s
,

n
o
t

l
i
n
e

f
e
e
d
s
,

b
u
t

n
o
t

a
l
l

o
f

u
s

w
o
r
k

t
h
a
t

w
a
y
.

[ellf.livejournal.com]

Because it's considered polite.

The root problem, though, is that "politeness" is a relative and rarely employed concept. In this case, someone has to convince the original poster that (A) LJ-cuts are indeed in accordance with what they should do, and (B) to actually do it in this particular case.

That's ridiculous, especially with computers. I don't quite get why the LJ folks don't implement a per-user option to auto-LJ-cut anything over X words, where X is defined by the user. The very idea behind CSS, web standards, and the ilk are to enforce aesthetic standards on the client side, rather than kludge it in via the content provider.

Alas. In the absense of a technological solution, we have to resort to a social one -- which is that the overall detriment to WAP using/vision-imparied folks of not cutting longer posts is greater than the mild amount of effort that an interested user needs to undertake to see what's behind a cut.

[jd-science.livejournal.com]

i fixed it. see, i can self-censor for the public aesthetic, so why can't the bank? :p

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

For future reference, don't bother. :)

[hauntmeister.livejournal.com]

You may disagree, but I don't see this as self-censoring. It's a matter of being polite to the audience, and making sure their "friends" pages remain reasonable.

As I post, there are 80 replies to your thread, and LJ has automatically begun collapsing most of them into just the subject lines. Evidently, my request that you lj-cut your post hasn't detracted from people reading and discussing it, and LJ's automatic truncation of the replies hasn't detracted from the discussion in the least.

Imagine, if you will, how impossible this discussion would become if LJ were including the full text of every reply. You would be perpetually scrolling and never reading. Now imagine how impossible someone's "friends" page would be if nobody used LJ-cut. It's the same thing.

Again, thanks for using LJ-cut.

[nalz.livejournal.com]

Huh - I don't really care about lj-cuts one way or the other - but I do find it funny that you like it when LJ shortens comments into subject lines, but I wish there was a way to make it never do that.

[ron_newman]

Me too! I'd really like an option to turn that off, either globally or on-the-fly.

[hauntmeister.livejournal.com]

We're nearing a hundred comments in this thread. Can you imagine how impossible it would be to find anything if LJ didn't shorten comments into subject lines? Seriously, even with a full DSL connection, a scrolling mouse, and an extra-large screen, I would find it impossible to navigate.

And that doesn't even consider visually impaired people, those who pay by the byte for downloads, or people using mobile devices with limited screen real estate.

But that's just me, and my personal presumptions about others. Yes, there are some who would like all text visible at all times (for one thing, it would make searching easier.) And I acknowledge that there doesn't seem to be a way to make LJ not compress long threads, for those who would prefer it that way.