Things what I writ

I sometimes write nonsense about things to try and sound clever

10 years of meetings

globalisation strategy
globalisation strategy by Tim Caynes


I wrote this ten years ago. nothing ever really changes.

You just click on your name and then go to that menu on the left. no, the top. Hang on… So, I select my name, right and what? Go to the menu and select ‘make me great’. I don’t have that option. Oh. No. Wait. I need to make you great so you can share your greatness. Wait a minute here…Ok, you should be great now. Well, I have a circle next to my name, does that make me great? Erm, I think so. Try to do something great. Ok, what like? Try sharing your greatness with the rest of us. Ok, hang on, share…um…greatness! Right. Do you see my greatness. Oh, no, wait. I’ve got a popup. It says I can’t be great because its not my meeting. You need to make it my meeting before I can share my greatness. Is yours still there? No, its downloading an update of itself. Oh, right, so what about you? It rebooted my computer. Oh. Do you own the meeting yet? Um…well…I have a square next to my name now. Not a circle? No, a square, with a circle in it. What colour is the circle? Its blue. And the square? That’s blue as well. What? And the circle is inside the square? Yeah. Never mind. Do you see greatness on the menu now. Hello? Are you there? I think they’ve gone. Hell…Hello? Sorry, I was on mute hahaha. Ok, it says I now own the meeting and so I’m going to share…greatness! Ok. Go! Right. And now I see your desktop, is that right? No, we should see yours. Well, I can see mine. Yes, but that’s your desktop. That’s behind the share app. What share app? The one you’re trying to share your greatness with. OOHH. I SEE! Right, wait, I get it now. Hang on…

click. click click click. taptaptap tappy tap tap. click….

click. tap tap tap tap tap tapapapapa tap tap tap. click……..click.

Oh. Um. Its asking me to download version 3.0.0.12.3. I can’t share my greatness with this version. It says it will only take 30 seconds. Wait a sec…

click. click. 7 minutes life vacuum.

Ok. I have to reboot to finish the installation. Is there another agenda item that we can go to while I get this working? I’m really sorry. I’m not really very familiar with this application. Ok, well, we’ll move on to the next item and come back to you when you have th — BEEP BEEP BEEP. What? Hello? Oh. I think we lost her. Right. Ok. Never mind. Let’s move on to the next item in the agenda, which iiis.let’s see…yes. Video conference with Singapore and the UK. Let’s see, we’ve got 5 minutes left, so let’s go ahead and try the video. Does everyone know where the video conference room is? Right, its in building 7. You just go out the lobby, get in your car and drive to building 94 and it’s on the second floor. The room’s called ‘Ozark Mountain Daredevils’ or something.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzz

bongos

dirty crowdsourced topicality in the face of wantonly and abject dereliction of the idea factory presents unique opportunities for the playful construction of words in an order such that once spake might elucidate some retrospective meaning like some backward journey through time that begins at the end with the ripped out pages of the book yet to be written and ends with the realisation that many this way tread upon the atrophied pathways that for a generation as yet unaware of the passage of themselves are the very trails of their own existence mapping the life stories of the millennium across a landscape of indifference which in its own way is a bit like facebook innit.

for we render our own paths across this landscape leaving the tiniest most significant pieces of ourselves as dust upon the earth that dances and dies with every footstep that disturbs the peaceful equilibrium while the future self declines linkedin invitations from our own reflection in the broken windows of house parties in clapham where we drift into a haze of tomorrows as the bongos of iniquity are drummed in our ears by the flat palms of forever.

looking forward is much the same as looking back. except its the other way around. but that depends on how you’ve described yourself and whether your description is meaningful to me, because, after all, here I am, right beside you. as far as I can see, we’re both as entropied as each other. it’s just that I’m a bit taller, so I have further to go. if we leave together, we might just make it.

listening post: m83 – reunion

On being topical

One of the most difficult things to overcome when attempting to create some masterpiece of literary commentary with a topical edge is trying to work out what the topical edge is without coming across like some trollbaiting landgrabber whose only purpose in the act of creation is to somehow capitalise on a zeitgeist that probably isn’t geisting and most likely has run out of zeit in order to further some perceived standing in a peer community whereupon the very act of dribbling inanely onto your ipad keyboard would be celebrated with some not insignificant cacophony of trumpets, trombones, grinding teeth, handclaps, notification alerts and apnoea snort-awakes such that congratulations, you’ve captured the moment like some now fish in your net of insight, grabbed from the jaws of one of those thought leader brown bears poised over the river of consciousness ready to paw a beautiful shimmering leaping thought salmon to thought death AND THEN EAT IT WHOLE WITH THE HEAD AND EVERYTHING.

Sometimes it’s simply a question of saying something because you feel like it for no reason at all. I can pretend that it’s relevant to the current topic somehow by relating it to a current activity, like watching the morning keynote at the IA summit and wondering how my using IA writer and saving into the cloud to write this plays rather neatly into Scott’s contention that I’m locked into some kind of app cave hardwired not to the cloud but to a cloud in the sky of clouds and make some ironic commentary on my connectedness to a old paradigm and how I’m literally careening into the trough of ultimate despair without a smart seat belt, but that would be a pretty cheap shot at crowbarring a topical reference in to a moderately nonsensical accident of prose just because I happen to be talking about this stuff later. I would never do that.

Waiting for the train that never comes

hepworth 1

“Here’s my platform. I’m stood on my platform, waiting for the train. But the harder I wait the less the train comes. It’s a paradox. The train will never come if I wait for it, however hard I wait.

So I go to my park. Here’s my park. It’s got grass and trees and things. There’s places I can go and just not worry about trains. So I stand on a pole and start not to worry too much about trains. Soon I’m not worrying about trains at all.

And then my feet leave my pole and I ‘m lifted to the sky. I’m flying. I look down at my park and there are other people in my park. They’re not worried about trains. They’re just doing whatever it is they do.

Before I know it, I’m way, way up in the sky. I’m so far from worrying about trains that I’m playing with the planes. The planes are orange and Easy. Not like the trains.

Oh, the trains. I need to get a train. I’ll never get a train up here. I need to get a train. We all need to get a train. Where are the trains?

So I’m back at my platform. I’m stood on my platform, waiting for the train. But the harder I wait the less the train comes. I know there are trains. I’ve been on trains before. They took me right where I wanted to go. But there’s no train here. Maybe I’m waiting too hard.

Wait, here comes a train! I think that’s a train I can use. Let…Oh. It’s gone. Still, there’ll probably be another one. You know, wait hard enough for one train and they all come at once.

<pause>

No. No more trains.

But wait. It’s not just me. There’s other people here waiting for a train. Other people trying too hard to wait for a train. I wonder if they have a garden? Or a pole? I wonder if they fly? I wonder what kind of trains they’ve been on? So we talk. We talk about gardens. We talk about poles. We talk about flying. And we talk about trains. It turns out we’re all waiting too hard for our trains and those trains just never seem to come. Maybe we should stop waiting so hard.

And you know, as we’re talking…a train arrives. We’re not sure where it’s going, but its there, all the same.

And then another arrives. We’re not really sure where that’s going either, but it looks kind of interesting.

And more and more trains arrive. Until there’s so many trains that we just don’t know which ones to ride on. But it’s alright. Because we’ll just try a few and see where they go. We don’t have to go all the way, but it might be interesting so see what happens. How about we just take a train each? We could meet back here and tell each other how it was. If we really like one, let’s take it all the way together.

Here’s my platform. I’m waiting for the train. But I’m not waiting too hard. Seems to me, the harder you wait the less the train comes. Anyway, my friends will be here soon. We’ll not wait too hard and just see what happens.”

Hacking NFC

Not strictly speaking hacking the protocol or platform or whatever you want to call it, because that might require rather more technical knowledge than I have left and implies something that is probably illegal, but hacking, in terms of using the near field communication infrastructure to muck about and produce something akin to a chocolate fireguard that you can show other people and say ‘look! I did a chocolate fireguard!’, as they add the finishing touches to their ‘tap-to-space travel’ demo.
 
Last week, the UK’s first NFC hack event was launched in Norwich. It’s a pretty ad hoc affair, under the Hot Source banner, that Proxamaare supporting by making their NFC technology platform available to anybody who wanted to enter a team. All you have to bring to the party is your creative minds and a willingness to stand in front of the other 17 teams at the end of the month and show them what you’ve managed to build. And show them you can. With an NFC-enabled phone, access to Proxama’s hardware and software, tags and tech, you really can build an NFC-enabled technology solution. You just write that HTML5 stuff that displays a monkey, loyalty card, free gift or whatever, when your programmed NFC tag is tapped with your phone. Of course, since your team defines the experience, owns the code, has the idea in the first place, you can do much more than monkeys. If you want to write a bunch of HTML that’s loaded in webkit, or the Proxama app, and then have that web content do something else, like, say, integrate with your ecommerce platform, turn on the lights, leverage location services on your device and send a message to the queen specifying exactly where the bloody cake is to be delivered already, then you can do that, just with a tap of your phone on the programmable tag.
 
You see what’s possible here? It’s not just about using your phone to pay for a banana. I mean, the platform could support that if you wanted to do that, but, like, you can already do that. The idea of the hack event is that armed with the technology platform, you create something new, innovative, quite possibly ridiculous, but definitely original and potentially commercially viable. And, if it is, all well and good. Take that idea away with you and make it commercially viable. Proxama aren’t going to steal it, it’s your IP. Do with it what you will. What the event is about is demonstrating what you can do with the NFC platform. And I’m leading the Flow team. There’s also a Foolproof team, but, you know, I don’t give them much hope for winning the competition. I mean, I can’t see how anyone is going to top my shark tank escape game. It’s simple – you get dropped in a shark tank with your NFC phone and have to tap on the hidden tags to open the escape hatch. You either tap all the tags, in the right order, within the time, or, well, the demo gets really interesting. I haven’t decided which team member is going to demo it yet, mind.
 

Let them meme cake: Conspicuous connection in the social network.

I’ll be honest. I’m only writing this post because I thought of the title. Now I have to write the content. I know I’m not the only person who does that.

Having said that, the title was borne of an observation that we’re moving/have moved into a new phase of conspicuousness, driven by the desire to belong. This time it’s a curious elitism defined by your connection mass in the social network, but conspicuousness draws on a strange lineage from a mythical Marie Antoinette to many on the net via as much as I can get and mourning those I’ve never met.

Conspicuous consumption

As a device to delineate a social class, as with the conspicuous consumption of the cake-eating French aristocracy, its intention is clear: to define yourself irrespective of others. While not so much about cake, there were clear, if unwritten, rules about the externalisation of wealth and power to demonstrate your status. This was mostly manifest in the construction of elaborate and ornate dwellings and the furnishing of one’s self with much dandyness. However, it also demanded that you were a magnanimously social creature – the burden of lavish party-throwing and fatuous, fabulous benevolence was great – but all these attributes identified you as belonging to that noble, narrow aristoclass, unattainable through mere social climbing and fiercely protected by the bourgeois with their own laws on how to use the dressing-up box.

Conversely, through the industrial revolution of the late 19th century, when the term was first used, and the post-war era of the 1950s, particularly in America, conspicuousness was all about perception of social power and ascending the social strata. Conspicuous consumption here was more about demonstrating accumulation of wealth as a means to describe your social standing, in the process, creating its own social class – the nouveau riche. In contrast to an aristocratic, 6-fingered, birth or marriage right, this was an attainable variation of social climbing, and conspicuousness was part of its tactical implementation. While often attributed to the already wealthy as some kind of vulgar, modern rendition of cake-baiting, it probably more accurately describes the actions of those who can ill-afford the conspicuous investment, but still have that desire to be seen to belong to the class that can.

Conspicuous compassion

In the tail-end of the 20th century, a more emotive form of conspicuousness began to surface, that seemed to suggest a different kind of need: to define yourself to be just like others. Conspicuous compassion was posited by Patrick West, for Civitas, as a kind selfish, ostentatious recreational grief, which was triggered in individuals who had somehow lost their way due to the diminishing social influence of the church. It is suggested that this ‘mourning sickness’ pervades our modern society, because we have need a to show how much we care, without actually wanting to waste our Sunday mornings at church when there’s a sale on at Next. Think flowers on royal hearses and ten-minute silences.

Conspicuous compassion, as described by West, is a mawkish ‘me too’, whereby the collective forms in an extravagant display of ‘grief-lite’. Strangers coalescing to cry over strangers. Make of that what you will, but how they come together is what makes his opinion interesting. It’s the idea that the conspicuousness of the individuals’ emotional response is the qualification for belonging to a particular social group that says ‘I care’.

Conspicuous connection

In contrast, conspicuous connection in the social network says ‘I care’ in a very different way. It satisfies a quite different need: to define yourself to be more popular than others. Conspicuous connection doesn’t necessarily speak of influence, which is a quite different metoogorithm , but it definitely speaks of volume. It says ‘I care that you ‘like’ me’, and it is an evolved ranking system that simultaneously holds no value and means everything.

You could argue, in hindsight, that the volume-driven connection model that was first massively popularised by MySpace was a kind of post-modern ironic, generation Y in-joke, as the friend numbers passed from ridiculous to sublime and back again. There was no real connection in MySpace. I was more like stumbling into the biggest teenage house party in the world. There wasn’t really any social collateral in the numbers, it was just a bit of a laugh. Friends were added, rather than tactically coveted.

As Facebook really told hold, rubbing MySpace’s face in the corporate sand and as Twitter appeared as the curious IM/blog hybrid it was ok to admit to, then conversion tactics really emerged. Driven by the inflation and recommendation model of the herd and the revenue from ads for baldness remedies and weight loss (is that just me?), marketing strategies developed to maximise, monetise and commoditise the network. One of the primary strategies was volume. And that is why conspicuous connection is so prevalent.

Conspicuous connection is the manifestation of the desire to be seen to be a social prime mover. Influence is hard to measure. Numbers describe a kind of brute-force reach. Consequently, the larger the numbers, in theory, the further the reach. Which is why elementary volume tactics, developed by gurus, used by the rest of us, account for a sizeable proportion of content itself. Following, liking and connecting, is what creates your social mass. In some cases, the mass is so large it creates its own social gravity, sucking in the rest of us. It’s this planetary tipping point that completely alters perception of influence, and so the very act of asking other to get you there is now an acceptable strategy.

It just doesn’t appeal to me. But then, you’re probably not reading this.

overloading my function

since waking up in a real job where I do proper work and stuff, I’ve been spending less and less time expounding on such hot topics as situational awareness or pressing buttons in a manic fit and when I have managed to construct a few over-long run-on sentences, I’ve mostly been doing it for my current employer who has kindly let me do so in between the other bits of time when I’m actually doing the work. which is to say, I’ve not been writing here for a while. which is fine, because I’ve been busy, and I’ve been expressing my ideas and thoughts somewhere else.

now I’ve settled into some kind of cadence with regard to writing, and since the blog I write for my employer is a shared blog, and there’s any number of brilliant minds there who can contribute, I’m currently compiling drafts of thoughts of ideas that will never get published unless I funnel them into an appropriate bucket, which is where this am is, right here. so that what I shall be doing.

social broadcasting

I rather like social interaction online. for many years my peers, co-workers and friends have mostly been in different timezones and an expensive phone call away, regardless of who was actually paying the bill. there’s nothing like the direct connection of, say, IM, or chat, or IRC (oops), or nearly-connected twitter, or even asynchronous email, or, at a push, facebook status (excuse the pun. actually, don’t, I put it in on purpose. its supposed to be there), to connect with people I really can’t be with in person. I can pretend to myself that because we still interact directly on a mostly 1-1 basis, that we’re still kind of friends and that we’re actually having a conversation. it works for me.

however, and I don’t usually begin a paragraph with a however, however, in this case, its appropriate, in recent months, nay, years, the increasing market for social networking technology across multiple platforms and devices has driven things into a bizarre self-fulfilling adoption-fest whereby its no longer the interaction that sustains the apparent connectedness but the dissemination and aggregation of the message that appears to matter. in others words, its no longer about what you say, its about how something else distributes it. and how someone else embeds it into their own personal social network architecture. where it festers. and dies. in a soup of loosely related social media artefacts which are abstracted from their original content types and dumped like a mahoosive bucket of unrecognisable old fruit in a shiny new bin round the back of Tescos, which coincidentally, you chose to shop at. its not interaction, its broadcasting. and now you’ve lost me.

oh, hang on, my phone’s ringing.


listening post: M83 – graveyard girl

good enough for you, good enough for me

98/365

why does it take so long to decide which platform which gadgets which colours which page width which font I might want to choose when setting up a blog when I could have spent the same two weeks writing a number of entries that would probably have answered those questions in a way that might become self-evident? because I like doing that. I like fiddling with the bits. I think it makes a difference and notwithstanding the obviously hacked together html and javascript and third-party widgets and nonsense I’ll use once and throw away even though it will wreck the template I spent two days creating by hand because my blogging platform doesn’t remember what I did before, I hope you think it makes a difference too, because that’s why I did it.

well, I kind of did it because I like orange, but there is more to it than that, honestly. I mean, I’ve got asterisks. they’ve got to represent something, like the concentric yet angular growth of my brand as symbolic of the acquisition of knowledge and its application in providing solutions regardless of the problem. or that they’re nice. and I’ve already used one somewhere else so I’m stuck with it. also, I spent at least a day deciding whether to use a single or double colon in the page title since I know that a a single colon with no space is the format that will be used to concatenate the blog title and an entry title and so there’ll be some kind of consistency there but hey, I quite like the double colon thing even though it’s largely meaningless. in fact, I would have finished this entry ages ago had I not decided that I suddenly wasn’t keen on the list styling and so just made some ridiculous and undoubtedly browser-breaking tweak to the css using percentages of ems just to calm myself down.

still, if its good enough, its good enough. I’m not paying myself to do this.


listening post: supergrass – mary
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