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Thanks
to everyone for coming to our Grand Rollout, this presentation of Shaping
San Francisco's first edition to the public.
Thanks to the San Francisco Public Library for hosting this event. I
am especially happy to be here at the Library because Shaping San Francisco
is not about a private company bringing a product to market, but a community-based
project that has knit together diverse voices and styles and understandings
to inaugurate a new way of discovering and sharing our collective histories.
The Public Library is one of the few public instititions left in this
era of rampant privatization and ubiquitous corporate sponsorship, although
to be honest, it too shows signs of being absorbed by market relations.
We offer our first kiosk to the Library to undescore our commitment
to the public. We celebrate our inauguration here at the Library in
the same spirit.
Thanks and acknowledgements:
Greg Williamson, Jim Swanson, Joe Caffentzis, Marina Lazzara Jim Fisher,
Dimitri Loukakos, Magali Barre, and Daniel Steven Crafts, the core production
team.
Ralph
Lewin at California Council for the Humanities for their patience in
the wake of our 2 years trying to finish our project for which they
granted us $10,000. Thanks, too, to David Rosen and Gabriel Metcalf
for efforts to raise money, and to all our private donors: you didn't
give us enough money!
This project
exists thanks to over 200 different writers, photographers, and helpers
of various types. In the past week, our website was created from scratch
by Giovanni Moro, Daphne Blumenthal, Lisa Brenner, and James Barcelona.
Thanks to Nancy Peters at City Lights, and Jim Brook for editing the
book and Mike Mosher for designing and painting the kiosks.
Finally,
thanks to my family for putting up with everything, and giving help
in so many invisible ways.
Shaping San Francisco is designed to create a new kind
of public space around our shared histories. It is not the last word
on local history, but the first edition of a media experiment in which
we can tell each other how things were, what shaped our lives, what
was tried and what worked and what didn't? Ideally, Shaping San
Francisco will grow and publish future editions. If Shaping
San Francisco is widely used it can reach its goal of becoming
a living archive of San Francisco.
Shaping San Francisco is different than previous efforts
in multimedia in a number of ways. First it is designed to promote interactivity
between humans rather than between a person and a box. Much of the hype
around this new media form focuses on the buzzword 'interactivity.'
Interactive multimedia is really an elaborate, technologically sophisticated
form of multiple choice, nothing more. SSF is a bunch
of linked computer files that are designed to reinforce creative responses
to our daily lives today.
History is a creative act in the present as our values and ideas frame
the questions we ask and the answers we discover. Many contributions
to Shaping San Francisco are passionate, opinionated,
perhaps even biased. We don't believe in objectivity too much since
you can always find the assumptions underlying histories, and those
assumptions are always rootedin specific values, specific points of
view.
The CD-ROM and our book
Reclaiming San Francisco
are for sale, true. But our primary goal is to create a network of free
public kiosks around the city, hopefully anchored in the public
libraries. In establishing these public sites, we expect Shaping
San Francisco to become a modern-day watering hole, where people
meet, ideas and experiences are shared, confronted, and debated.
No simple encyclopedia, it is designed to encourage wandering. We do
not emphasize a clear picture of the contents like one might expect
from a book's Table of Contents denoting a linear progression of pages.
We have dozens of long articles from a wide range of authors, some thoroughly
footnoted, others less so. We offer considerable depth in many areas
to accompany our breadth. Our sense of what qualifies as 'history' is
probably broader than most.
Assuming most folks who try Shaping San Francisco will
not be well-versed in local history, we divided stories, photos, and
the occasional video clip and animation across 40 sections: 22 neighborhoods
and 18 subjects. Explore Shaping San Francisco much as
you might wander the actual streets of the city, but in Shaping San
Francisco you can dig deeply into surprising, often forgotten corners.
We hope people will follow their curiosity around and see what they
discover along the way.
The priority is to make it widely available in public places for free.
Shaping San Francisco is designed to be used, shaped,
challenged, amended, corrected, improved. If it gains the confidence
of the silenced majority, it could even come to resemble a new, radically
democratic media, opening a new grassroots channel and arena for popular,
participatory history and politics.
We hope our use of this form will inspire people to talk with each other,
perhaps argue and really debate questions that confront us as we explore
our roots, our identities, even the most simple question, "how did life
get like this?"
We enthusiastically embrace our beleaguered public commons, which is
suffering an unrelenting assault by the boosters of privatization and
the world market. In fact, most of what should be in our commons, from
land and resources, food and shelter, the airwaves and the oceans, even
our collective intellectual heritage, are all increasingly claimed as
private property.
We all know that many of the things we once did for each other without
thinking have been replaced by the purchase of goods and services.
Shaping San Francisco's existence is fresh evidence that
not everything has to follow the rules of the Economy. In fact, it's
pretty clear that no one would pay the million or more it would cost
to produce this project as a business proposition. Our motivation is
to instigate new social processes at the roots of society.
In pursuit of this, Shaping San Francisco embraces the
passionate identities that various social groups have put forth in the
past few decades, while challenging everyone to go beyond their specific
identity to find the similarities in our diverse experiences. By linking
and cross-referencing the various stories and perspectives in pursuit
of a new synthesis, we hope to erode some of the balkanization afflicting
social movements and groups.
The folks who bring you Shaping San Francisco hope it
will trigger new ways of undestanding our world, and new kinds of relationships
between individuals and communities. Perhaps, someday, if we're lucky,
we'll be able to look back and say this project helped to change life!
—Chris Carlsson January
22, 1998 San Francisco Library
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