Category: culture
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Longplayer, and the Long-term View
Longplayer is Jem Finer's intriguing project to write and perform a one thousand year long musical composition: "It began playing at midnight on the 31st of December 1999, and will continue to play without repetition until the last moment of 2999, at which point it will complete its cycle and begin again". As part of…
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Speed Freak
"The Beethoven that you and I know, and that we all know, may in fact not be the Beethoven that Beethoven wanted us to know. We may be hearing his music in a way he did not intend at all." I was rather stopped in my tracks by this short Radiolab podcast about the speed…
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Falling Into The Audience
I did like this new TED talk from activist-performer-singer-songwriter-blogger-provocateur (people who defy description make me happy) Amanda Palmer. She talks evocatively about the art of asking for support (financial and otherwise) from your following, and how that process can help build powerful connections with people. She calls it 'falling into the audience' which is a…
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Kowloon Walled City, Podcasts and Sabbaticals
After a hiatus I've suddenly (and somewhat randomly) started listening to podcasts again. The end of this intermission was marked with this episode from Roman Mars' 99% Invisible series on the subject of the Kowloon Walled City, a 6.5 acre enclave in Hong Kong that became home for 300 interconnected high rise buildings that grew organically over…
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Google Firestarters 7: Remix Culture – The Event
"Remixing is not scary, or depressing. It is empowering" The Firestarters events that I curate for Google are all about inspiration, challenging thinking and provocation and for our latest event on Remix Culture we had that in spades in the form of an excellent talk by writer and film producer Kirby Ferguson. Kirby is the…
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Google Firestarters 7: Remix Culture
"The remix is the very nature of the digital" William Gibson At our last Firestarters event at Google in September we expored the theme of digital storytelling through the lens of three excellent speakers and some great contributions from the audience. Following on nicely from some of the ideas that arose there, our next event…
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How Movements Happen
There's a really interesting chapter of Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit (Why We Do What We Do, and How to Change) analysing the habits of societies and how social movements happen. Duhigg uses the example of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in the mid 1950s which was sparked by Rosa Parks being arrested after refusing…
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How I Write
One of the regular readers of this blog Olivier Legris was kind enough to give me some good feedback on a recent post and as part of that happened to ask me about my process for writing. I'd never really thought it through before, but doing so made me realise that I definitely have a…
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On Company Values
I'm not really a fan of mission statements. Rather than being an exercise in inspiration, looking at an aggregated list of the mission statements of the Fortune 500 companies makes you realise how vague and riddled with corporate-speak many of them are. Mission statements are all too often just that – a statement of intent that is…