Alex Bowyer // A British thirtysomething living in Montréal, Canada, with interests in people & society, technology, science fiction, films, travel and getting the best out of life.
Can also be found blogging at alexbowyer.blogspot.com and tweeting as @alexbfree.
I think the strongest message of last night's Challenge Your World event was this excellent short video by Sebastian Baptista from Uruguay. A simple idea, powerfully conveyed. Technology is not the answer to every problem.
This is Hyperland, a BBC2 documentary with Douglas Adams, Tom Baker, Ted Nelson and others, broadcast in 1990 - that's before the World Wide Web, before DVDs, before digital TV, before the Internet as we know it.
What's quite remarkable is the amount that it gets right:
All in all, well worth 50 minutes of your time if you are interested in changes in technology and media and their effect on society.
I found this today on Russell Davies' blog.
That is the thought-provoking possibility suggested by the RepRap project. RepRap is a simple 3D printer that can make plastic objects to any design, on your desk, using an ordinary PC. It can even make a copy of itself. It's entirely open source and freely distributable.
Ryerson University, the University of Western Ontario, Rabble and The Tyee have also started a very interesting multimedia project to explore this technology and the effects it will have on society further, called Maker Culture. You can read a good introduction by Wayne MacPhail here.
I am intrigued to see where this might lead. Developments in computing capability and internet technology have given us recording studios, photo labs, broadcasting studios, video editing suites and printing presses from our desktop - and have completely changed those industries as a result.
What changes can we expect in the world's manufacturing industries if goods no longer needed to be manufactured and distributed, but instead you downloaded a design and printed it yourself at home (much like you download an MP3 or movie and burn a CD or DVD now)?
Certainly this is a technology in its infancy, but full of promise. I can't wait to see how this develops.
Here is a video of how technology that many people have in their home can be used in ways not intended by the manufacturer. This is interesting, but even more interesting is the wider trend this represents, as Johnny Lee describes - how the Internet and new media formats such as YouTube for video distribution can quickly spread ideas to thousands of people. Not just for persuasive purposes, but to do real good, allowing any teacher or parent to create their own interactive whiteboard using a Wii remote and some cheap hardware. Scientists are already starting to talk about how they can rethink the way research is done for this information-rich, hyper-connected age we live in. It's really exciting that scientists might finally have a way to directly explain their work to the public without having to go through journalists who don't always understand the science, or who are encouraged to take the most sensational angle.
Exciting times are ahead, I'm sure ...
A great visualization of global media scare stories over time - Swine Flu is measurably bigger than previous hyped stories.
This video has just "gone viral" on Twitter and elsewhere. Everyone is forwarding the link around.
All you need to do these days in tell your story, and if it's sticky enough, the world will spread it, far more effectively than any company's PR department can.
As social networks online grow, consumer power grows. Companies that treat their customers badly need to wake up and listen, or this will happen to them too.
You can read the full story at Dave Carroll's site. Whatever he lost in the value of that guitar, he will soon gain back in getting his music to new audiences.
Oh, and the best bit? There's another two songs still to come...!
The doorbell rang, a delivery man was there. "Sign here", he said, and handed me a cardboard box. "Thanks," I said, noticing how light the box was. I knew I'd recently ordered two new hard drives and a SATA card (to connect them into our server). This was too light to be either.
You can see from the photos below what was inside - a box the size of two shoeboxes, stuffed with brown paper, containing 2 tiny red SATA cables (which could at a pinch fit in a normal paper envelope if you wanted to). I had ordered these from http://newegg.ca/ as part of the order for the SATA card. I was shocked that they would ship these individually and in such a wasteful way. A jiffy bag would have been more appropriate, and why on earth do the cables needed to be shipped separately.
This got me thinking, people talk about how we should have an economical model where we take into account the real environmental cost, not to mention the money cost. I can't think of a better illustration than this. Not only all that waste packaging, but the fact that the delivery man made a separate trip to deliver it.. Wasteful deliveries like this must equate to a lot of fuel, vehicle wear and tear, not to mention packing note printing, labour to package the thing, backroom admin by the supplier and the courier.
It's really sad that somebody decided it's "cheaper" to treat all items the same, send each part of an order in an identical size box, regardless of what it really needs or what is sensible.
I guess common sense doesn't scale.
Here's an image I found online which tells a similar story quite succinctly:
(Found via @leisa on Twitter - Thanks!)
Just came across this talk by Malcolm Gladwell telling a story of how the food industry learned about the need to identify different types of tastes rather than looking for the "most popular". This ties in neatly with some of the ideas I have blogged about before about the need for anyone developing a product or service to find out your user personas and decide which ones to target, rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach.
