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

[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.

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

Ah. 1 post takes one space on a displayed friends page no matter what the length.

Some years ago, I changed my friends page to 30 entries per to lower that number of clicks by 50%.

Cutting posts just means MORE clicking.

[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.

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

My point about increased font size is that it cost me 4 more keystrokes and that that's not an overly high cost, I suspect even if you're working with only a mouth stick to type with, as the cut means you have to deal with at least the click forward and the (either click back or close window/tab).

My point about people not clicking through is actually that people miss content they DO care about due to cuts.

(As well, I'd also say that this post isn't long. 2889 bytes isn't long.)

(Oh, and I'll comment on the sign in a moment, too. :)

[jadelennox]

But you're *not* using a mouthstick -- and as much as your common sense tells you 4 keystrokes isn't a big deal, I'd love to have this conversation after you've spent a week doing all your computer use by adaptive tech. Whereas I *am* using adaptive tech, and I'm absolutely hoarse by day's end. Trust me when I tell you that four more repetitions of "page down" "page down", at the end of a long day of more of the same, is, in fact, an overly high cost.

It seems the end result of this conversation is that your life is made worse by cuts, which I can accept. But what I am saying, like other people in this forum, is that my life is made worse by uncut lengthy text. Can't you accept that your use patterns (never clicking through even fascinating links; using a big-enough monitor optimised for some perfect amount of text; having no cost to multiple pages of text) is not everybody's else's experience?

[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/

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

A) I'd suggest using page-up/page-down... far better than scrollwheels for covering distance, until they put speed modifiers in to the wheels (which they may, but I've never seen).

B) Are you saying you want to be able to get to any random post on a page with a minimal number of keystrokes? Because the layout I use, for example, has comment count in the page summary on the top left of the page, and that might well be available in other situations. (The layout I use, when viewed in lynx, puts that summary at the top so there's a minimum of scrolling to see what's on the page.)

C) I'm not sure what I'm supposed to get from looking at the OMA link...

[artic-monkeys.livejournal.com]

Sorry for the confusion, I was definitely not clear about C)

It is all about "service interoperability across devices, geographies, service providers, operators,..." in our case operators.

It does us all no good to agree on a way of doing things, to come up with a standard if someone "pulls ahead" only to be "proprietary."

[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. ;-)

[jadelennox]

Well, that's legit, too. *g*