The 3L Mantra to live by!

My book, ' The Leisure Commons: A Spatial History of Web 2.0 ' has just been published by the Routledge Science, Technology & Society Series.  About the book:  There is much excitement about Web 2.0 as an unprecedented, novel, community-building space for experiencing, producing, and consuming leisure, particularly through social network sites. What is needed is a perspective that is invested in neither a utopian or dystopian posture but sees historical continuity to this cyberleisure geography . This book investigates the digital public sphere by drawing parallels to another leisure space that shares its rhetoric of being open, democratic, and free for all: the urban park. It makes the case that the history and politics of public parks as an urban commons provides fresh insight into contemporary debates on corporatization, democratization and privatization of the digital commons . This book takes the reader on a metaphorical journey through multiple forms of p...

You trade coffee, tea, spices, rubber...you trade music, art, film; human traffic as commodity and more...what I don't expect is the import of national histories for tourism! Let me explain my bafflement here. In the Ardennes mountain region of Belgium, one with a long and complex history where the battle of the Bulge for instance took place, it has a little town. Within that town, a monument dedicated to the victims of the Ardennes offensive sits right next to a 'Red Indian' paraphernalia shop, one that has been around for apparently several years. Instead of battle of the Bulge souvenirs, you can take home feathered headdresses, cowboy hats and Indian chokers... History rewritten through urban planning and design!