McDonnell's "crossing borders" reminded me of my dad's old saying "i feel like columbus' father...". Old cranks talking about how new fangled gittyups were going to change the way folks went 'ta meetin'....just like dusty little towns on the pony express trail used to grouse about what would happen to their hometown once that big old railroad finally got connected.
And then those news towns on the railway got all bustling until uh oh here comes Eishenhower and his new fangled highways: everybody get out your handkerchief, there's bound to be a movie like "Fried Green Tomatoes" on the way, about a dusty little town time forgot after the railroad lost its luster...
Although he promises an analyses of three borders, he barely touches on the temporal (just how fast will this article be forgotten???), then rushes into the whole issue of what will people be like when they don't have to scale a fence to get over to america to get a job...oh, wait, that's what they'll say ONCE AMERICA BUILDS ITS FENCE....in other words, i don't see much reason for Jim to have spent his good time on this piece: unless you're in design and you want to quote one of the Eames, who famously posited that there would be no good design without good problems, i really don't think mr. mcdonnell had very much to say. i think i just did a marvelous job talking about the article as if it had been, after all, worth the time...
Jewitt is another matter: Ushahidi is a GREAT find, and i have no idea how long it would have taken me to find this service on my own. while eyewitness experts have always been the bane of not just courtrooms but ANY room where a good eye view is taken as sacrosanct (and shouldn't be), jewitt doesn't belabor the eyewitness citizen journalist too long before he segues into what's developed AS A RESULT of some of those citizen journalists...the "break and expand" theory at its finest, only not in print. Many at dallas morning news describe the break and expand print theory, where they're more than happy to let twitterers break a story while they develop background to expand it in their paper. Ushahidi is the human equivalent of the print story; on this site whatever has "broken" of world interest is not only expanded, it becomes a site in and of itself, where at any given moment you can check back in to the area/problem you were originally interested in to see how you and others around the world may be changing whatever situation interested you to begin with. This is the instance, perhaps, that the much maligned Mr. McDonnell was looking for: here the temporal DOES play with the spatial...although apparently only at this point in my imagination, as an observer of the Gaza site is up and asking why the team at al-jazeera isn't using the time/spatial view afforded by Google Earth...wonder what he means? That information could be relayed as a new kind of "typography"? And why was Al-Jazeera onto something new when they refererred to Google Earth as a "spatial map"? What is the other kind of map?????