When It All Fails

January 25, 2012 under Cyber Culture, News

When running your own business you can easily forget that you are human and need plenty of sleep. I often find sleeping gives me a lot more focus and can clarify your short and long term goals. If all else fails then I’m pretty sure you will start dreaming new actions.

It seems that there are a lot of people in the digital world who are finding it tough and are having even more difficulty running a business on its own without the constant itch of modifying social media patterns. The reality is that only reality can bring in money and the digital world is slightly false. If you can get to grips with is all, well done, otherwise its important to understand whats best for you and also for your business.

Having returned to the real world I have found that Reality does not suck. In fact its better than the digital world because I can always bank on getting some form of feedback. Sometimes the blank look and sly distractions that gain their attention first show me what the clients may really think of me. When in (Rome) the digital world I often feel that these parts are missing and have therefore left me unable to understand why communication has broken down.

If like me you are a creative person or are simply self-employed. I would urge you to remember one thing. If all else fails, take a brief moment to see what is actually going on around you. When all else fails, join the real world and work at realising and improving what you have got and then consider knocking on those doors. Its only ever a fail if you choose to give up and move on.

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The Apple that dropped from the tree

December 16, 2011 under Cyber Culture, News, Technology

I do not seem to be too sorry for not writing an update any sooner. This is probably because there are too many gadgets and news items to go through during the build up to the festive holiday. Through the shroud of the Blackberry messaging (BBM) failing alongside the playbook fighting to stay alive and the even greater darkness of the late Steve Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011), it seems we are all ready for a break.

In the latest reveal it seems that the Android platform have released more stats that suggest they could be catching up to Apples 1million App downloads. However somehow Apple are still seen the the cloud with eternal silver lining.

The latest update of Lion IOS combined with the iPhone 4S seems worth a blog of its own. The voice application Siri sounds really impressive but what seems even better is that iCloud is FREE and has the ability to sync up everything smoothly. I do hear those novices screaming wants new about syncing. The new service allows you to have everything synced without any clicks and in zero seconds! This is magically done by Apple uploading all your stuff to their servers at super speed and then allowing it to be transmitted to your devices even faster.

Apple explain to us
“iCloud stores your music, photos, documents and more, and wirelessly pushes them”
but fails to let us know about the security. The company has made something great and also made a greater friend with the local governments as crimes all around the world can now be resolved. It may not be obvious to you but it does seem like this is a digital age we are living in and its ever more becoming part of the George Orwell world where people are being watched. The iPhone allows people to be tracked on its own so the idea that iCloud can give away all of our details, communications and information for storage use, just to access them quickly, is actually quiet silly.

Its yet another step into instant gratification and ironically does suggest Apple is now playing the role of the creature that tempted Adam to eat the Apple that dropped nearby. It sounds really tempting but it equally does have the consequences of loosing many more skills that us humans do need to learn and develop.

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when will coffee shops get a big blue like button

September 19, 2011 under Cyber Culture, Leeds, Marketng, News, Social Media, Technology

In the world of the web and business, people are always buzzing around thinking about what the next big thing could be. The difference between these people is they they talk about it and some others help make the dream a reality. Ever since the dawn of cyber-punk we have managed to create a self-fulfilling prophecy where society gains the new products and designs that we are told are new.

The reality is that there is a lot of technology that is based on peoples ideas of the future. Rather than building new products we are handed the vision from ‘Space Odyssey” or given phones with touch screens that have already been designed and thought through by science fiction. The future supposedly will come to and end and when it does we will have to go back and live amongst the trees.

With this mentality of looking back on our roots and the things that have worked for us in the past, I have a new idea. We as children are taught to play but when we are older we do not recognise that we do still play, its just that we do it in different ways. Whilst we move through the urban cities to and from work, we all interact by moving around the city, and absorb the marketing artwork before us. My suggestion is quiet simple. What if we could now actually be tagged and use the marketing or objects around us to connect to digital media, weather it is social media or event visiting a site.

Once upon a time people complained about the files in their cabinet, and now we have hard drives to condense the space. By using technology we may have answered certain questions that allow us to live in more space and gain access to things more instantly, but why has nobody thought of complaining. Technology seems to have kept its shine despite the physical nature is still the same and the manual labour of the real world and the digital work is the same, only less strenuous.

If we continue to need our bodies for certain things and we increase the use of technology, how on earth do we actually have time to live online and use facebook? The answer for that is really quite simple. Whilst going to your local shop to buy a magazine, in the future, you have the chance to press the ‘like’ button and actually comment if you wish. Cameras could also start to track your eye movement so that marketing companies an talk to you directly each time you look at one of their products. This doesn’t mean up selling, it means that the digital cloud technology behind it will be able to tell you if your choice could be a good or bad one based on your income.

As a red blooded male its typical that I only want to go into a shop to but what I want, but all that can now change. If i see something I need at home, the voice from above may then remind me that I have been in the shop 17 times before and I liked this on facebook so much I tweeted about it and I also need to buy it because ive run out of it and need a top up!

What if we are now living at a point in time where we are actually at the tip of using technology manually and now we just need to find ways to make the cloud part of the real world. In being human, surely the point of living is to live. So when will we be able to live the life we want and share it effortlessly at the same time, seamlessly as part of the real world. My final question about the unknown future is; when will coffee shops get a big blue like button where people can just hit the button to vote, thus avoiding the need to spend time getting their device out, find the site, login, find the online coffee shop, find the like button, and like it !

 

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Do we need social media or does it need us

September 4, 2011 under Cyber Culture, Leeds, News, Social Media, Technology

This is a slightly stranger post that asks the question, do we need social media or does it need us. I think this is a stranger post than my usual because I have had time to reflect back on my real practises.

In getting busier I have found that I have been a little unhappy. Not because im over worked but instead that I am finding that I am too busy in the real world to tweet and facebook and generally get digitally social. Instead of spending time digitally mixing with people, im doing this in real terms. This is the fun stuff and it does not make me sad. What has made me sad is that as a consequence of me living my life, my klout score has dropped and some twitter folk have stopped following me. At the same time I feel im getting more responses because my less frequent tweets are fully loaded. So now im left bitter about life and how I need to manage digital life.

My reality is, and possibly your reality too, that I am actually good at being social and it does not matter about where or how this happens. In recent years I have had my own choices and feel that I can choose my own path about the things I like ands dislike. So the question then arrives to me at this point. Do I need to be digitally social? Well, it all depends on your field or work and how busy your personal life is. It doesn’t really matter, but it can make a huge difference to someone who needs to engage directly and feel confident.

In my busy period of neglecting some social media it seems that I have also missed adding photo albums of things I have been doing on Facebook. After a week or two my partner then decided to post those pictures on her Facebook albums. All I was left with was a buch photos that I was tagged in. Its almost like the digital world had began to remind me how rubbish I am being at keeping in touch. Having taken a brief look at my partners pictures I found that she had oddly become more social.

Here is the interesting bit. Not only did she seem more interesting and popular than me but she also had a full stream of information about “Big Brother” other TV programmes and was also following bands and festivals like Leeds Festival.

I seem to be happy, and so does she, so I guess social media does have a place in our world. But in all honesty I really believe that I do not need to communicate in that way, I just choose to. Having social media is a digital add on. To answer the second half, does social media need us..? Yes, of course it does. Without us the social media sites would be charging money. So the idea of it being a free social medium is non-elitist. This sits really well with a utopian vision and it also tricks us to into the feeling that we are all together when really we are not. I still have a lot of people to meet.

By engaging in social media I am only continuing my level of instant gratification onto a much more grown up platform. Not only am I becoming dumbed down but social media makes me feel stronger and more powerful about being dumbed down. How odd! To make matters worse, companies like Facebook are making money form me. Okay so thats not a bad thing, but its terrible if you consider that by wasting time in voyeuristic behaviour I am not actually learning in the way that I should be. The right way would be to get my hands dirty and engage with reality.

I hope that you have come to the conclusion, like me, that social media is a dumbing down tool that equals additions like drugs at times and that we do not need it! Social media most certainly needs us.

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Friends Circles and Networks

July 8, 2011 under Cyber Culture, News, Social Media

Depending on which circle you are in you could have different types of friends and it might even be that you keep your personal friends separate to your work friends. You may also have networking events or just bunches of people who you network with and meet, however they are not your friends, are they? Having many different faces and roles in different circles is a complex way of looking at how we live and mix with people. Put simply, we are social creatures with many different levels of attachement and we like to reach out and connect on different levels so we can keep a level of privacy.

As social media is now big business and now no longer free, with people around the world spending millions on digital social media strategies. The one main reason why social media is great is because it reflects the habits of a real person.

Tech Talk!
With Facebook taking the basic word “friend” and using in a digital capacity, people are now relate this word with something digital. The reality is that it is a descriptive word for what the friends button actually does. The major issue with the website has been that many people feel that “friending” and the privacy settings are not great and could be better. Despite Facebook’s effort in making changes, it seems people are still unhappy with the settings. The main gripe is that people can not easily relay information to one set of friends and at the same time keep information private from a separate circle of friends. The human and digital interactions are now completely blurred, in fact far too similar except Facebook lives 24/7. Any information you place out there is always out there and retrievable, not just by your friends but also by the colleagues who you dont want to share things with. Maybe there are other options out there.

There is a new social network in town to rival Facebook called Google+ which seems to have stepped firmly on the toes of Diaspora and Altly. Like shops crammed together in the centre of town there are now a few more options to where you can network. Google are unlike Twitter, who created a very robust and highly unique platform, but instead have chosen to take on Facebook.

 

Reality!

I suppose its now at this point that I return to the conversation about how we all have different circles of friends. With people now spending time online it seems that we may eventually forget how to speak and talk to people and forget that sometimes things take a little while to get to what you want. With this new generation of people and technology we all want to share online. The reason why I have written so much about technology in this blog is to say I am human and something stinks.

When advertising was big business we all bought the supermarket food until someone said this is badly put together. Im doing the same here I guess. All the technology above is grand and amazing however it’s still early days and it’s only feeding and weening you onto wanting and needing the internet. These social network sites are great but can not replace what is real and never will. The next time you get that deep feeling or the little ping in your head that leads your hand to reaching for your phone or switch on your computer, please remember one thing, do you need to tell someone, or do you want something else?

There are a number of emotions that we relate to when we look at adverts and these feelings are now even stronger when looking at adverts because they are personal to us. Online marketing now targets YOU and what YOUR trends are to be able to market products to you.

When we are children we always play and talk to other children however as we get older it seems that we are all onions and have far too many layers, so technology can help, however it doesn’t really help. Just like buying cheap sausages with 10% pok content, the internet is giving us something that is still watered down only we can’t see it. If you want the real thing, the ability to communicate and have a support network, to be able to have different circles of friends and tell them all different things at different times. The choice is easy. Use social media as a tool to give out information about your life without being too emotional and involving and also make the effort to tell everybody what you want them to hear, in person.

The only way to save time from learning and administrating your life online is to engage with your life offline because that life also works 24/7 wether you realise it or not.

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Altly – ready to do battle with Facebook

May 28, 2011 under Cyber Culture, News, Social Media


CTO Dimitry Shapiro once upon a time helped build Myspace, the first real mainstream social networking site and before this brought us VEOH.

It seems that there was a bee in his bonnet about Facebook (FB). Since FB started to use specific user information to target adverts on a more personal level more and more people have been worried about how easy it is for our details to get out and be abused. Shapiro particularly believes that although FB started out okay it now needs a competitor that can promise to keep things private and allow people to control their right to control their every move and control how much data is actually used against you to market products.

This new idea, FB would argue is silly because they are already doing their job, has spurred on despite there being past companies who have tried and seemingly failed. I have written a bit a bout Diaspora is a past blog and how this has not really shown much sign of life.

There is a nice long manifesto on the Altly site that also includes a mentioning about how it feels, and another website can prove, FB has actually changed and watered down its privacy policy rather than strengthen it. This site on its own has merit. With FB being on the news it seems that bad publicity on their part could also help the rise of the Altly site.

“A recent CNN story titled “Young job-seekers hiding their Facebook pages”, cites that ”A recent survey commissioned by Microsoft found that 70 percent of recruiters and hiring managers in the United States have rejected an applicant based on information they found online.”  http://articles.cnn.com/2010-03-29/tech/facebook.job-seekers_1_facebook-hiring-online-reputation “

With a quick mention of how Google did not decline there was a new planet to evolve a social platform called Google Circles, it really does seem that there is a change in mentality rising up from the digital world. More and more ‘doers’ are coming forward from the background and challenging some of the big digital giants. From the days where McDonalds and Sony are being challenged it seems the trend to challenge large online companies is the new boundary to break.

With some serious investment put behind this project, it seems that Altly could be the next big thing, and could be the first company to rival FB. The reality is that no matter how fast communication is, only time can tell what will work and fail.

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Do we need a Hero?

April 27, 2011 under Cyber Culture, Leeds

Late last night I somehow managed to write a comment on a blog about finding a hero. The article seemed to grab me from an unusual angle. I should also mention that I found the blog through a tweet or two.

It was suggesting that ,in this case Leeds City Council and other bureaucrats, the city needed a hero to help guide and channel, or even champion everyone together. I personally believe that this is a terrible idea. Nobody wanted Jesus to walk the earth, it just happened. It seems that post 2000 we are now wanting another god like figure. Am I to guess that having a local government and Prime Minister is not enough. These arenas already have strong leader figures and even if the governments dont float your boat, there are community leaders or centres!
Okay, so the last bit may be a slight jump and a different tangent. The point is still the same. Do we really need a hero or a leader in a society and culture that is already affluent and rich. It seems even stranger that the blog that inspired me was a blog, something digital. In essence the words we write on a digital surface may mean a great deal as it is poured out of a human soul, however the fact that is poured onto a digital surface is quiet funny because it doesn’t exist. A piece of paper does exist and will do in the future, unlike a digital prose that could disappear either at the click of a button or when a server dies.

It seems that the over saturated use of media and marketing has lead our culture to want a free’er version of reality, something digital, a world that we can control and but also fulfils the ‘global village’ need to be instantly gratified. As most of society seems to be on facebook it seems even stranger that the art and craft of a community champion is based in the real world, and yet we look for it online.

It seems the more I write, the more a hero looks unlikely. The idea of magically wanting or looking for a champion is thought of in a modern manner. We NEED a hero, where are they? We don’t have one! Why? Because we live in a world of instant gratification where you may want or need one. Had our culture of thought we wanted one, like we do now, it may be wise to realise the next one will arrive in 30years from now if we plant the right seeds NOW! Let me spell that out, it has to be RIGHT and it has to be NOW.

At this point I must confess I am also asking a lot of question about what I have written as it opens many doors. It seems that, just like watching a film where we require a sense of escapism and control to feel gratified, we have met our new best friend the underground hidden darkness that we all hope will become the light. The digital world. Rather than following the rhetorics of wanting and being a part of the ‘global village’ it now seems we want freedom and happiness from the world wide web. To take this further, what happens if we only want it in our local area, or within our personal circle, wether it is a city, and borough, country or continent. Essentially we no longer care about the world. We just want where we live to be a better place.

With the rise in use of all things digital it also seems that we want the world wide web to be the dark angel that saves us. The digital world that has opened the door and allowed escapism has equally allowed us to become withdrawn from an area of society. We now no longer feel the desire to help, hence we need a champion to push us. As mentioned, the champion must be based in the real world. My own conclusion is that in the new digital age, there may be a champion around the corner who has the greatest following online and that this person will need to be incredibly ugly poor and has no friends family or social life.

Is this what we want, or are we creating this as our future by the way in which we use technology more and more?

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Social media will no longer be social

March 15, 2011 under Cyber Culture, Social Media

Once upon a time we use to peer round the gate or over the wall, or even walk a few streets and say “hello how are you today”, but this has all changed. Through the years as technology took over the work place and made people redundant, it now comes back again and makes us redundant from walking and bothering to meet people.

When facebook came about, we all knew that myspace was something interesting but had a specific demographic. The idea of being able to keep us sat on our bums and still talk to people was great but with facebook you could be human and go anywhere, take pictures, live life and talk about it. The only problem was that it wasn’t fast enough, for some reason people wanted to talk when the were doing it, not when the had done it, and in walk twitter, the short burst conversationalist.

So far it seems like fun, but when Google did not deny it was building “Google Circles” it had to be big.  So here is their idea. Currently social media is in a world where you always talk to people, but things like privacy settings mean you can select who you talk to. It seems that technology has a knack for imitating human behaviour, but Facebook only really publicises you and what you get up to, as does all the other social arenas. This new social platform, if I know Google well enough, will probably take everything you do and put it online, so when you go for a meal or review something it tell you which of your friends recommends this to you. Currently this is something that does happen but its going on if the web site wants it to, and even then its a case of doing it with each and every single various feed of social media. What if all these threads could be put together. Not only this but the idea of me talking to my best friend on twitter and my partner on Facebook in a way that is transient and simply just the same as talking or typing, well, its mind blowing. I cant tell you how long I have been waiting for the social world to be minimised to some degree, to allow us to just say something and for it to naturally speak to who I want and talk without logging into several websites or apps.

Lets back up a little. So if this is getting better then there has to be a down side, my personality is always aware of this other side. I’m afraid its back to the once upon a time story again. We use to see adverts on walls and TV and other places and think, that looks interesting. With the digital pay per click boom it seems that online marketing has always been a trend people wanted to keep up with. With the rise Google’s Circles its possible that we could see and even more increased presence of online marketing in the form of social media. The internet although may people think is free, actaully is not, someone makes a lot of money somehow. Facebook currently makes its cash by getting adverts onto the site and suggesting people should click them, and even further, they ask you why you like or dislike an advert to help make their service better. What the new Circles platform would be doing is the opposite, they will take our threads that talk about how much I like a service, either through likes, comments, hastags, lists, or foursquare, and makes them available to the other websites. This means that every time I go shopping at Tesco or Amazon, it will tell me what other people think or if they liked something.

what’s really interesting is that these people are our friends, so the idea of being online now becomes really personal and centered around the individuals using the computer and changes what we knew as social media to the rules of marketing. Thus the new world of marketing. The real questions to some up in the future would be around marketing and asking ourselves if this change means social media is now changed its face to sociable marketing media, a far cry from what it once was, a place where we could just connect.

Listen!

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Being Digital / Being Human

March 7, 2011 under Cyber Culture

Being Digital or Being Human?

Im not too sure what it is but it seems to me that I get bored of my website every year. Other than this I also get bored of my music collection, art work, computer and phone desktop. With so much that I would like to change and keep fresh faced, it seems that I have yet another skill to add to my cv, electrical appliance administrator. Of course this title will also include things like fixing and cleaning the toaster and regularly re-scanning the digital television.

In today’s world, why is it that I find myself on-line or at the very least on my computer. This single device seems to have captured our imaginations and we now use this as an excuse to get to grips with reality. What has actually happened is that people now use spell checker and have consequently got lazier when it comes to spelling. With eduction dwindling down the drain, what happens to people who cant spell. They text. What people use to call sms is now texting, and holds a glamorous language skill set of its own.

Forgive me if this now seems like a leap but here we are typing and texting yet the next stage to the illiterate society I knowledge. The same technology that has enabled people to text is also a great friend to those who WANT information and WANT to know the right spelling whilst they head to the nearest Starbucks they WANT to drink in. In case the capitals were not obvious, the gradual leading hand of technology has now fed our once children and now made then, now adults, part of our society and even better, they run our country and our economy.

I seem to be part of this new digital age and culture that has all the tools it needs and more, the only thing let to do is to do things and mix things up a little. Social media seems to be the first sign of success where opinions and view are exchanged and communities are working together in their own way. The final frontier for the digital world is to conquer our feelings. If the web could help us through those tough times and have a solid support mechanism that pushes us to communicate in an effective way, this could be the way forward. If there are websites and application that actually consider the human form then its about time they became popular because it seems to me that instant messages to the brain can sent through visuals, movements, videos and audio, but the the written form has allowed us to be human and keep our distance from being digital.

Is the world ready for being digital, or would we much rather being human.

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