So please, show this fight against obesity some love andVOTE NOW. We also appreciate your support for the campaign itself, spearheaded by ‘My Kitchen Rules’ star chef Pete Evans.
Hop on over to the website andthrow your weight behind the cause. Simply by connecting your followers and friends via Twitter or Facebook you add to the total tally of Australians knowing about the facts. And hopefully we are ready for change.
Just discovered the new Facebook Home concept. As my mate Ben Cooper of The Monkeys predicts, see the (Android) servers crashing on the 12th of April.
Good to see that they didn’t throw this idea into an overwrought cinematic drama and tell us that our phones are actually like chairs. Try sitting on them, you will see, they are not.
Otherwise I leave it to this (mobile!) screenshot to avoid retyping our conversation this morning.
No, I am definitely not an early adopter of the American radio show ‘This American Life‘, led by Ira Glass. Having only started listening 3 or 4 years ago, the show has been a launchpad for great writers like David Sedaris and a cornerstone of US public radio for more than fifteen years, attracting similarly praise and adoration as well as some great spoofs. You can listen to the show on the web, here in Australia on National Radio and naturally, on smartphones and tablets.
Ira, also fronting the brief television version of ‘This American Life’
Following the show backwards into its archive has become a bit of a habit of mine; filling the commute or that last half hour before nodding off with Ira and his team, as they choose themes and several acts to tell their stories. Which is how I discovered this classic episode (#66) called ‘Tales from the Net”.
Listen to This American Life #66
It is from a time in which I myself studied at Helsinki’s MediaLab and had barely mastered the different technical and social aspects of the web. This included now mostly forgotten services like CompuServe (a geeky version of AOL), telnet (for bare bones versions of email and chat), usenet (bulletin boards) or CUSeeMe (an early Skype).
Awesome, I can see you AND your IP address!
This particular episode is a bit of a shock (it’s been 16 years already with this webby thing) and an amusement over the way net phenomena are explored:
“Girl hooked up with a guy she met online. And he promised her a free version of Office 97.”
“I emailed a stranger and now we are like family.”
“Some people prefer net meetings over encounters in the real world.”
So give this episode a go, especially if you’ve been online since then.
Amnesty International has launched ‘Write For Rights‘, a site with the aim to support 11 individuals that are targeted by their government though they have committed no crime. You can pledge to write a letter of support, sign up for a ‘Write’ get-together or volunteer to host such an event yourself. Reactive Sydney, which created the website, will host a ‘Write for Rights’ BBQ this Thursday evening in Surry Hills. You can help – by dropping in and just writing a letter, putting the spotlight where it’s needed most.
Kirby also appeared as a TED speaker on the subject with his talk ‘Embrace the Remix‘.
Kirby talked about his analysis of creative work, which falls into three categories of either copying, transforming or recombining existing elements. Many legends of music like Bob Dylan and Led Zeppelin more or less admit to using existing songs and melodies in their work. It’s how they learned to find their own style. Stand up comedian Richard Pryor taxed the time it took him to find his own voice to about 30 years. Similarly scientific break throughs aren’t leaps of imagination but often a transformation or recombination of previous knowledge and tools. Kirby took Henry Ford as the example of combining conveyor belt and other elements of mass production and deploying it for the automobile (which he didn’t invent).
What resonated with me was that seemingly original ideas often reveal their influences, and that it is ok to work like that. If we can admit that we are standing on the shoulders of giants, we can relax and keep inventing by copying parts, transforming and recombining them. But preferably avoid the pure copying. I think too often discussions in advertising are about the copying bit (in the sense of plagiarism) and used as a sledgehammer to cristicise and put down any transformative and re-combinatory (if that’s a word) aspect of the idea.
Kirby’s talk was organised by the resourceful guys from Portable as part of their Portable Talk series. I have already signed up for their next event with one of the makers behind ‘LookBook.nu’, Yuri Lee.
In case you haven’t noticed this site yet, it must be one of the most influential in terms of online fashion and (what they call) ‘Collective Fashion Consciousness’. Think of it as a ‘Sartorialist’ times 1,000. Book your front row seat here.
