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Why I went to Paris

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

The digital era of communcation is a great one because research for video material is no longer restricted the archives of the INA, France television, BBC, TSR and other archives to find footage you’re looking for. A producer from steamboat films was working on a documentary about the walkman and found a lot of historic footage to make the subject come alive. She aslo needed some comtemporary representation of how the modern walkman is used and came across silent disco and my footage.

The screening took place at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in the basement where there are two cinema rooms. The cinema was filled to more than half it’s capacity as all those who had worked on the three documentaries met to get to know their fellow contributors. The three documentaries are The Bookworm, The Concorde and the Walkman of course. Each one is an individual documentary with it’s own merits. I had the opportunity to see the Concorde documentary almost in it’s entirety twice as I arrived whilst they were testing to make sure everything was in order.

Having watched the Walkman documentary three or four times already, once with house mates and two or three times by myself it was fun to see an audience’s reaction. It’s fun to be surrounded by a professional group of people rather than fellow students. You see them laugh at moments that are both typically French and old fashioned. What they didn’t laugh at so much is the silent disco footage, probably because it’s too close to home. People did laugh, but not quite as many as I would have liked. I suspect the reason for that is that they’re thinking of how they dance so laughing would be making a slight joke of their own dancing.

There are two reasons why I enjoyed this event. The first was that it was the first time I’m surrounded by professionals as I get my first screen credit on the big screen at a cinema projection. It was also an opportunity to meet with the people that are behind the screen producing these programmes. I look forward to future collaborations in the near future.  I look forward to what the future holds.

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Night shift

Byrichard

The games are starting at 10am Tokyo time but 3am Geneva time and it’s amusing getting to work. Yesterday was really tiring as I’d been woken by workers at 7am. So far we’ve seen about 40 matches and Italy’s defeat was a shame. We only have one match at a time but four of them in total so our day is 14hrs long.

The teams today are: germany vs nigeria, US vs australia, France vs. Angola and Greece Vs. China.

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The twitter colour wars and sheep mentality

Byrichard

As if zombie slaying, vampire biting and sheep throwing weren’t enough the facebook lunacy has reached Twitter via Zefrank and the stupid colour wars. As if the conversation was not interesting and fulfilling enough for twitter users there is now a movement to create a colour war encouraging people to split into groups.

I dislike this movement for a number of reasons. For a start it’s a complete waste of time because it does not require people to do anything in the physical world. Just change your avatar and you’ve participated. That’s similar to the zombie wars.

As a second point it’s encouraging people to break into smaller clusters and groups, which although fun in certain situations where groups are too big is pointless on twitter. In particular I saw that for one colour the point was not to tweet but rather be tweeted at. Now why would you ask for people to remain silent when the whole reason behind twitter is status updates, firstly and conversations as a side effect of the first.

When few people used hotmail it was clean and e-mails were worth reading but as chain letters arrived so the usability went down. When geocities became popular so pages became flooded with junk, same with myspace and later facebook. I really don’t want to see this junk making its way into the twitter stream. I spend too much time there to appreciate it.

That’s why I won’t participate.

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Dirty Gold War screening at the Graduate Institute.

Byrichard

I went to watch Dirty Gold War at the Graduate Institute at lunch time today. The film is interesting because it makes you think about the environmental impact of gold mining. We’re familiar with the stories of gold mines in South Africa. We’re familiar with the stories of the gold rush. We don’t often think of the environmental impact of Gold mining in rain forests in Latin America. This documentary introduces the topic well.

It brings our attention to the fact that when people buy luxury products like gold watches, bracelets and other objects they are buying objects that have no environmental or ethical credentials. It leads us to question when the luxury industries will be accountable to such considerations.

Mobile Phones, laptops, televisions and other devices all contain traces of gold. If that gold is sourced from environmentally unfriendly sources then we are contributing to the destruction of the rainforests and the poisoning of ecosystems. Fairphone and other companies with such goals benefit from such documentaries because we are shown why their goals are so important. It contextualises their mission and their reason for being. It also helps to put pressure on all electronics manufacturers to do more to reduce their impact on the environment.

Dirty Gold is a topic that does not get much attention. As I reach the conclusion of this blog post I find that Dirty gold points to a music album rather than gold mining. We need to raise awareness of this topic. People are wearing wedding wings, luxury products and using electronic devices that are in part for the degradation of the environment. As awareness of these issues grows so companies like Apple, Sony and others should work to ensure a clean product line, from raw material in the ground to the finished product.

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Like An Airport

Byrichard

Most of the rooms are empty and cars are parked everywhere. That’s because today is the penultimate day of halls and everyone is leaving. Tomorrow at 10am all rooms should have been evacuated for the cleaning services to come and prepare the rooms for the summer groups.

It feels like me like waiting for a plane, everything is packed and there’s not much to do until tonight’s party. The bedroom is cleaned and stuff is packed. It’s pretty quiet, many people leaving, everything is finished now.

I’m looking forward to living in a more diverse part of London which will serve as a base for my job seeking. It’s going to be nice when, tomorrow, I have moved in to my new flat properly.

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Likemind Coffee morning in London

Byrichard

Two nights ago whilst having a conversation about technology with Fooz on twitter I got a message from Jamie about the Likemind coffee morning in Central London that she thought might be of interest to me. I decided that I would go and it was worth the effort. From what I gather it’s held once a month.

It’s a meeting that started around 0830 and continued till 1030 where a few people from various backgrounds in the media came to talk about a variety of topics. It ranged from Facebook and those that influence discussions to Qik, twitter and seesmic. Of course other topics were also discussed.

I talked to Mark of Wishful Thinking who wrote the e-book Time Management for Creative People. He has some interesting ideas and his blog can be found here. Whilst talking to him he touched on a number of interestin topics of which i would like to find out more. One was copyright and music for example, recommending a blog or two I should read and from the conversation I am interested in seeing what he’s been writing about.

If I’m not mistaken (and I did meet quite a few people) I also talked with Lauralynne about the challenges of finding work but also about twitter, a subject I know well. Arriving at almost 400 tweets she has a very different to the whole twitter thing. When talking to people many of them are not sure what it’s about yet and that’s why talking to her about it was good.

I talked to her about how society is changing. Previously when you met people you would meet them in person, be friends with them for a few weeks or months and one of the two would move to another country or another city and so the link would be lost, hence the utility for something like facebook. It then progressed onto a conversation about twitter. I explained my view that twitter is not just about saying what you’re doing. Another person who was listening in asked us to define twitter. I defined it as a multiplatform chatroom that you can take with you. I talked about the key difference between IM and twitter.

With instant messaging you chat with someone and you’re telling them about things as if you’re talking and you expect an answer. With twitter it’s about the day to day life. Through following your stream they’re going to come through a lot of noise depending on how often you tweet. That noise is what makes conversations easy when you meet twitter friends. You’ve got three topics ready because you know about the good and bad things currently going on in their life. It means you’re friends offline. Live in a city like London and you meet these people and a physical world friendship can occur.

The motivation behind this point was the notion that technologies are helping to seperate people and I wanted to refute that argument with the points made above. If you go through some of my previous posts you can follow the progression of these ideas further.

I heard Mark Iddon talk about his blog about multiplatform content and it sounds interesting although I have not yet had the opportunity to visit the site. Another person I came across was Damiano whose blog Nitmesh sounds interesting. It is described as : “A comment on the imploding chaos of the convergence that hopefully entertains, enlightens, educate, reminds and shares ideas that might stand out and make a remarkable difference”.

Overall the meeting was good, productive. I arrived feeling both inspired and shattered. Normal, I got to sleep at 4am and got up at 630 because I enjoyed the thought of being able to have more conversations in person rather than via twitter or seesmic.

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The Modern phonebook

Byrichard

Recently I have been trying to categorise websites and how they are used into single words. To this end I have recently started to view facebook as a self actualising phonebook. There are a number of factors which help to contribute to this feeling. One of these is the ability for me to add all “real life” friends without adding any “virtual friends” – friends I do not know in person. In so doing it limits the number of people in my contact list to those I have talked to in person at least once, but occasionally spanning two decades or more.

What is great about facebook is that those you have not seen in a decade are once more part of your daily life. I look at what people are posting and I know they’re in a number of countries. I can see which are their favourite films, whether they have recently travelled, whether relationships have crashed and burned or more. I can also see what they’re up to.

Twice in the last week I have noticed events put on by friends. One event was by friends whom are part of my University of Westminster days whilst others are from when i was a Bournemouth University student (albeit in Weymouh an hour away). When I went to the Westminster event I recognised quite a few faces since they are part of my recent history. It allowed me to meet new people and one comment was interesting. The girl who organised the event commented that most of these people did not know any others. She was the degree of seperation between all of us. As the night progressed so the links would strengthen and people who had been strangers just a few hours before would become familiar once again.

The next day saw me going to another facebook event but this time with people I had not seen for half a decade. By taking a look at the newsfeed in facebook I could catch up with these people. I saw that one friend was having their birthday that night and that another friend from the same time period was also going to be there. Looking through the photo stream I could see what the latest adventure had been. If people think that it’s important to mention something then it’s easy for you to notice and aknowledge this once you meet them next time.

When  you think of a phonebook you usually associate a limted amount of details like phone number, address, business and address. Facebook gives these details but it also gives us so much more. It’s a great tool for those of us who are mobile and willing to travel.

There are three contributing factors which help make facebook popular; the first of these is mobility, the second is international travel and the last is broadband.  The first two factors are related. I am thinking about the distance and time it takes to get from where you live to where the friend lives. If you’re in North London and your friend is in North London then it’s easier to keep in touch via the facebook newsfeed than to commute over an hour to see that individual. At the same time as more of us have international groups of friends so the cost of phone calls and ability to see how friends regularly declines. We need technology that allows us to keep up to date with friends and that’s why we need the enhanced phonebook. Broadband is the enabling technology.

There is a lot of information. Imagine taking two hundred pictures of an event where twenty of your friends are. If you have to mail each of these to each friend then this is going to take a lot of time and effort. Facebook allows you to do this without hinking about it, hence keeping friends you may not see frequently current to the life you are currently leading.  In effect the more open your network of friends are the easier it is to remain up to date with current developments.  At this moment in time Facebook is one of the best adapted to these needs

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