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

[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.

[ron_newman]

By "Next Page" what I really meant was clicking on the "earlier" link at the bottom of each page.

[mihmo.livejournal.com]

that's not actually the case. friends pages post in chunks of a certain number of posts. It doesn't have anything to do with the length of the posts. i believe the default value is 20, and it can probably be reconfigured to a higher number.

[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]

It bothers me because it means I'm LESS likely to see the content.

While I can't actually find the reference, I think there's been some informal research showing that content behind a cut is much less likely to be seen in general, that most people don't click through.

I just jacked my font size up so that
"Middlesex Marquee (again)
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:"

took up my whole 2048x1024 screen. The whole message took 5 pages.

As for reading on a portable device, I'd personally filter out communities in that situation.

[jadelennox]

While I can't actually find the reference, I think there's been some informal research showing that content behind a cut is much less likely to be seen in general, that most people don't click through.

Well, yes. The people who click through will be the people who are interested, and the people who don't click through will be the people who are less interested. Makes sense to me.

I'm not sure what your point is about having increased your font size. Yes, many people view with increased font sizes. Yes, having to scroll through messages that are not personally relevant to you under those circumstances is more difficult. Yes, it seems unreasonable that those users should therefore be forbidden from reading davis_square without added inconvenience.

I am glad that you would filter out communities if you were reading on a portable device; it means you're happy with accommodating to your particular limitations. I am also glad that the community rules for the Davis Square community do not require us all to abide by your personal accommodations. The community rules require cutting long posts in order to enable all of us with all of our limitations to view with maximum convenience. The only people being inconvenienced by that community rule are those who want to read all text of all posts, even when the posts themselves are not sufficiently interesting to prompt the reader to bother to click through a link.

Again, I'm very grateful to the original poster to respecting the request to put this behind a cut tag.

[artic-monkeys.livejournal.com]

I frequently check the page to see what posts were updated with new comments. It is a lot easier if I don't have to scroll pass large posts. If a post that i was interested in was commented i have to click on it anyway. So scrolling thru all of this can be burdensome especially when using this stupid laptop mouse. And the buttons on my other gadgets are even less ergonomic. check it out http://www.openmobilealliance.org/

[hauntmeister.livejournal.com]

Thanks. My views exactly.

My mentor for a year was legally blind, and used screen enlargement software for his computer. It was much more helpful for him to have email and postings with straightforward subject lines and the body of the posting behind them.

I occasionally use the web browser on my Treo, and lengthy postings like the original version of this posting make my "friends" list much less useful.

But mostly, I'm such a lazy b@st@rd that I can't bothered to twitch my left middle finger to scroll down. ;-)

[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.

[jadelennox]

But then the content isn't for you, I'd say. If it were, you'd be interested enough to follow the cut.

[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.

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[hauntmeister.livejournal.com]

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[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.