These photos are from a meeting at Milion Restaurant in Barrio Norte of the online group of IxDA of Argentina. The IxDA (Interaction Design Association) is an international organization dedicated to professionals who want to make digital media (mostly the Worldwide Web) more human and more usable. The challenges in Argentina are more severe where such practices and support for them are a lot less evolved than in the US and some other countries. We met to discuss these challenges and about launching our own website as a Spanish language resource for these practices.

“Now, let me be clear, just because he handed me a copy of Peter Pan does not mean that I’m going to read it — but it’s good diplomatic practice to just accept these gifts”
– Barack Obama, 2009 White House Correspondents Dinner

Hugo Chavez gave this book to Barack Obama. It seems as if President Obama regards this book as a tool of Hugo Chavez. He even mistakenly thought it was written by him when he accepted the gift.

It would be foolish for President Obama to turn his nose up at the chance to learn something from this book. This is not the Mein Kampf of Hugo Chavez (and even if it were, there could be something to learn there). This is a fundamental text that many Latin American people read in school. It is as important to the people of Latin America as reading about Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin is  to the founding of the US, as important as reading Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglas, or John Howard Griffin is to understanding the struggle of African Americans. Continue »

Various pebbles always find their way to me, as well as other meaningful objects.

Algunas cositas y piedritas que me llegan.

En la prevención de la Gripe Porcina, el barbijo debe estar colocado por la fuente del gripe, directamente a la porcina, no la persona.

To protect against Swine Flu, the mask should be applied to the source of the flu, directly to the swine, not to the person.

A teen was killed in Córdoba, Argentina a few months ago for having  a page on Fotolog.com. Other Fotologgers (better known as “Floggers”) have been found brawling in the streets with “Cumbieros,” who are fans of cumbia music.  This reminds me of the Mods and Rockers in the movie Quadrophenia, amongst other conflicts between urban tribes. (Note: Some worthwhile links in the text, especially if you understand Spanish.)

There are various urban tribes of Argentine teens who identify themselves in different ways, but a flogger primarily by having a page on fotolog.com. To be a flogger is obviously about more than just having a fotolog page, but that is where the name comes from. These are youths who are growing up in the age of technology and use online social media as a natural extension of their lives. Amongst the floggers, the most famous teenager in Argentina is one of them. Her name is Cumbio, an androgynous girl who has published books, attracts throngs of people in public, and has even been featured internationally in the New York Times.

The Cumbieros generally come from poorer backgrounds and resent the floggers for being more middle class, and sexually ambiguous (yes, you could say there is homophobia amongst the Cumbieros). And there are many more urban tribes. Beneath all these specific identities, the members of these tribes are all teenagers struggling with similar issues of self-identity. There are just too many to name, but I have taken a stab at listing a few groups here: Continue »

Today is the 33rd anniversary of the most recent military coup in Argentina. It was brutal, and amongst other things 30,000 Argentine citizens were “disappeared.” In other words, secretly tortured and killed in basements, thrown out of airplanes, etc.

Dictators are obviously not directly elected by the people, but they still depend on the support of the public. If they are too unpopular, they can be overthrown themselves or otherwise lose power. The last Argentine dictatorship fell out of favor for a declining economy and, amongst other things, unsuccessfully waging war on Great Britain to take back control of the Malvinas (aka Falkland Islands).

Everyone once in a while I see evidence of how a dictatorship was possible here, or how one could be tolerated by the mainstream public. I have seen recorded interviews of people who truly believed back in those days that the military junta was doing what was in the best interest of the Argentine people while protecting their way of life from communists (in a chillingly way similar to how US President G.W. Bush was given such unchecked authority in the “war against terrorism”). Even some people who had their own family members “arrested” somehow believed the government was working in their best interests. Continue »

peep fotos has just been redesigned. If you happen to be familiar with what was there before, the visual changes are subtle. More important is how the galleries are now constructed in a way which will allow them to be much fresher than before. Thus the difference should be more noticeable in what photographs appear, and being a photography gallery the photographs should be more important than the graphic design around them. With content being updated frequently, I hope that more people will have a reason to come back often.

When I first constructed the peep galleries four years ago, it was partly a lesson to teach myself the essentials of PHP and MySQL, which are specific programming languages for advanced web pages. I built the site from scratch, creating templates with PHP and storing all of the pertinent information to each page in a MySQL database. That is similar to how almost any successful website larger than a few pages is produced today. Continue »

The other day, without realizing it, my own father changed the way we communicate forever. Actually I was an accomplice in this, as I accepted his friend request on Facebook.

I love Facebook now, but didn’t start out that way. I was hesitant at first to join in after spending plenty of time with Friendster, Tribe, MySpace, Fotolog, and others. I didn’t see the social networking sites as much more than social masturbation and a return to the shallow schoolyard game of becoming popular.  I begrudgingly signed up for Facebook when my friend Albert sent me an invitation in September 2007. Quickly I found other friends via its tools such as uploading all my contacts, and discovering mutual friends of friends. Continue »

In Argentina, the change you have in your pocket is sacred. That’s because there just aren’t enough coins. Anytime you make a purchase, the merchant will infallibly try their best to wrest that last 50 centavos or one-peso coin remaining in your pocket. Waiters will forgo getting a tip in order to avoid giving you that $3.35 in change. I have refused my own boyfriend, Guillermo, change for the bus when, for the second day in a row, he requested 2 peso coins from my reserve in exchange for a paper bill. This has been the way of life here for longer than the 4 years I have been here, and recently it has gotten worse.

Public transportation in Argentina is great, but the buses here only accept coins as payment. The machines will happily give change for your one-peso coin, but there is nowhere to insert a paper bill. Until a couple weeks ago, the fares within the city of Buenos Aires were 1 peso or less, so with a single peso, you could count on transportation. Now that the fares have risen to $1.10 and $1.20, that is no longer the case. People are scrambling more to get those extra coins. Continue »

Without having studied it as much as it deserves, I am taking a stab at a topic that provokes extremely powerful and complex reactions.  My point-of-view may change drastically over time, but I have to start somewhere.  Continue »