Skateboarding and Spatial Literacy: 50-50.com

Though I'm clearly not a skater, I've admired the 50-50.com site for many years for the way it meets a particular set of purposes and speaks to a specific audience with a combination of modalities. The site has developed from a relatively simple where-to-skate-on-O'ahu information channel (and a place to post digital video of skaters around town) to a rich source of diverse material on skating and a space for interaction and discussion for the skate community. It also serves the purpose of organizing skaters to fight for more and better skate parks on the island, and for more understanding and respect from the community at large. These functions are summed up in the inventive use of menu labels for main sections of the site (combined with humorous JavaScript rollover images that reflect the grim humor of some skaters): absorb, interact, contribute.

On the "Skatepark Progress Page" in the "absorb" section, the site combines a journalistic approach to laying out articles (including pictures of key figures like former mayor Jeremy Harris) with photographic images and architects' diagrams of existing and proposed skatepark facilities around O'ahu. Readers can not only engage in the verbal discussion of the progress of these various facilities, but they can apply their highly developed spatial literacy to evaluate the plans for the parks.
This section of 50-50.com essentially "maps" the island from the perspective of a skater. This spatial "translation" of O'ahu into a social space, demarcated and evaluated in terms of "skatability," has been feature of the site since its early days.
Its rhetoric engages the culture of skating directly, appealing the specific "ideologics" native to this particular culture, but it also addresses larger social problems that emerge from the legal and economic infrastructure of the State and municipality, such as the marginalization and criminalization of youth culture.