Communities Dominate Brands Archive

Arianna Huffington on Barack Obama, Politics and the Media

All good stuff

Arianna Huffington – the future of Journalism

An interview with Arianna Huffington on the future of news Journalism. The Guardian writes

Arianna Huffington predicts the slow demise of traditional news reporting. Part of the Guardian’s Future of Journalism series

Hurricane Arianna and some thoughts on the future of news media

WH Smith – the Post Office – and the social fabric of daily life

On September 1 2006, I wrote Post office to move into WH Smith

Outlining the strategy to move local post offices into WH Smith

The high street retailer is set to enter an agreement that would see the Kingsway branch office moved.
The Post Office said the plan was good news for customers, while a watchdog said more details were needed.

The Commercial Workers Union said staff would have to take voluntary redundancy or transfer to another branch.

The Post Office said under the proposal WH Smith would take over the running of the main branch from its store in the Quadrant shopping centre – 280 yards away from the existing Kingsway site.

Programme director Byron Roberts said: "This partnership between two trusted organisations is good news for customers and will enable us to both safeguard and enhance their post office services in the future.

I wrote

Personally I would say that this is such a blatent strategy by WH Smith to shore up what will be its inevitable decline. I want to see Post offices in the village shop where they support and are part of the local community.

WH Smith is not interested in the community – it has no role to play in the social fabric of our lives

And so it comes to pass, a comment left on CDB begins

Our general post office is now in WH Smiths And they are useless! You wait for ages in the long queue. Then on arrival at the desk only to be told "We dont do 2p stamps anymore."On going to one of the last remaining local Post Offices I find that "Of course we are still doing 2p stamps" This was only one of many complaints I have experienced

At the old style Post Office the queues were activated rapidly with staff who were efficient and friendly. Nowadays you are met with someone who is obviously harrassed and probably as fed up as you! What I would like to know is who do we complain to? I have been told to report to a young man as the manager who looked as if he should still be in short trousers.

Kate my advice is to complain to the WH Smith board  contact details here

WH Smith said

that there was a "natural fit" between its brand and the post office which had been demonstrated by the pilot scheme.

"Customers quickly saw the benefits of the move to WH Smith, including the convenient location in the heart of the town’s shopping area, the modern and inviting post office environment, shorter queues, improved service and additional services, such as longer opening hours

But that does not seem to be the case. In fact this is being rather economical with the truth. A post office is part of a community, as I said, WH Smith is an out and out commercial operation, its management team demonstrate that. It must return a maximum profit and it has been struggling.

This represents the decline of a valuable service. Moreover the economics of village life means, when the post office closes – the village shop closes. People are forced into their cars, old people are forced to travel, or are cut off.

In the Network Society – would you vote for this man?

John McCain ‘technology illiterate’ doesn’t email or use internet

‘Nuff said.

here’s a few words we wrote about a younger black man who utilised the power of networks to move his campaign in overdrive.

Via Emma Mulqueeny

TV was for baby boomers Mobile is for Generation ‘C’

For teens the future is mobile writes Smart Mobs… Stefanie Olsen on CNet News: Marketers convened recently to figure out how best to reach teens on the Internet. The answer: It?s all about the mobile phone.

All about the 7th Mass Media then

TV was for baby boomers Mobile is for Generation ‘C’

For teens the future is mobile writes Smart Mobs… Stefanie Olsen on CNet News: Marketers convened recently to figure out how best to reach teens on the Internet. The answer: It?s all about the mobile phone.

All about the 7th Mass Media then

Speed

Speed is Good, Time is the Devil said Hitachi and John Thackera in his book In the Bubble writes that

Our designed world reinforces the value we place upon speed. But the signs are that speed is a cultural paradigm whose time is up. Economic growth and a constant acceleration in production have run against the limited carrying capacity of the planet.

Many of us want faster computers, but we also want more balanced lives – lives lived at speeds we determine, not at speeds dictated by the logic of systems beyond our control

Image published under a Creative Commons License by ?ole

AND

Questioning speed and acceleration raises interesting design and innovation questions. Should we continue to design only to make things faster? Is selective slowness consistent with growth and innovation?

How might faster information help us live more lightly on the planet?

From 1771 to 1971 – we have accelerated the pace of our economies and our lives and they have become as a consequence heavier as Thackera describes them.

Its thought provoking – and the book forces me to reflect on the process of design, system design, designing for outcomes vs. designing for a status quo. The Bill Bailey principle

Bill is asked how he comes up with his jokes – he says ” I start with a laugh and work backwards, what do I need to do to get that amount of laughter”.

As we evolve from the position of Installation to Deployment of a new social and economic model enabled by recent technological developments.

Design therefore should play an important role in helping organisations evolve over the next ten years and more. Because the decisions we make now will shape our futures.

And back to Speed as a concept – as we race through our lives, racing to work, racing to pick up the kids, racing to the shops, racing to the pub, racing to get the latest gadget, racing to go on holiday – I muse on this question – has the consumer society made us happier? Has material wealth brought with it greater value and meaning? And the answer to that question is very ambiguous.

Learning can no longer be seen as something that is done to children by teachers

And I could not agree more.

A different approach for teaching our children is a report published by Charles Ledbeater and covered in the Guardian

The word relationship drops in as does

that qualifications aren’t the only goal of an education, and that there are different – and often better – ways of making sure that children leave school with the cognitive skills they will need as adults.

As we have a need to de-school society

Relationships cease to function as effectively in big groups, so too do schools, so large comprehensives should be broken up into a smaller number of schools – as has happened in certain parts of New York.

I sit here and ponder this – if we can only maintain 150 real relationships or connections – then why do we impose a Straight line – read – linear / industrial approach to education? See what I mean.

So we need and I would say demand the Engaged Learning Community

where education can be transformed into something truly useful for all children and society.

Which leads me onto another point of view, and one made some time ago By John Stuart Mill writing On Liberty in 1859

Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.

Mill also wrote

Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign

which leads me onto a Howard Rheingold post Participatory Media to better enable Civic Engagement

Teaching young people how to use digital media to convey their public voices could connect youthful interest in identity exploration and social interaction with direct experiences of civic engagement. Learning to use blogs (?web logs,? web pages that are regularly updated with links and opinion), wikis (web pages that non-programmers can edit easily), podcasts (digital radio productions distributed through the Internet), and digital video as media of self-expression, with an emphasis on ?public voice,? should be considered a pillar?not just a component?of twenty-first-century civic curriculum.

Participatory media that enable young people to create as well as consume media are popular among high school and college students. Introducing the use of these media in the context of the public sphere is an appropriate intervention for educators because the rhetoric of democratic participation is not necessarily learnable by self-guided point-and-click experimentation.

and here a report by Pew on education and its potential future.

So how do children see their education system?

And why is this important? Jonathan Fanton

The real gap between tomorrow’s digital haves and have-nots will be a lag in competence and confidence in the fast-paced variegated digital universe building and breeding outside schoolhouse walls…. Today’s digital youth are in the process of creating a new kind of literacy; this evolving skill extends beyond the traditions of reading and writing into a community of expression and problem- solving that not only is changing their world but ours, too… In this new media age, the ability to negotiate and evaluate information online, to recognize manipulation and propaganda and to assimilate ethical values is becoming as basic to education as reading and writing.

From Wikipedia and media literacy

And back to the UK – Derek Wise Head teacher at Cramlington part of Leadbeaters report says

We want to break down the idea of the school as an institution where children have no say in their education and replace it with one of an institution where they learn the things that are important to them, at times and in ways that are relevant to them

Engagement in education?

Cramlington gets the same budget as any other school and some of what it wants to do in terms of group and personal learning is restricted by classroom design. But even here it has used its ingenuity to reconfigure an existing block to allow a whole year group to work together with a team of teachers, and its new year 7 and 8 building has been designed around the concept of inquiry-based learning.

We embrace what we create! And as Euan Semple says of of the Networked Society

there are no such things as conscripts – there are only volunteers. Young people are coming into traditional organizations having spent the entirety of their young lives: collaborating, networking and getting stuff done in very different ways. They are confronted with an alien world of: linearity, silos, hierarchies and the ego of title. The friction is palpable because the old organizational models cannot cope with or take full advantage of the new potential, unleashed is a profound transformation in the way of doing things, of getting stuff done.

So why should school be any different?

The report is good thought provoking stuff. I just hope its not just not more frothy stuff on the top of a Latte?

In 2005 we documented a project called SoundStart

SoundStart began in September 2001, when 30 young pupils from Elmwood Primary School in Croydon became the first to try this unique musical experiment. Unlike most music tuition that takes place outside the classroom, Soundstart takes a whole class from beginner to concert in one term. Jupiter brass and woodwind and their UK distributor Korg UK, working with Croydon Music Services, gave each child an instrument of their choice ? a wide range from flutes to saxophones, some of which the children had never seen or heard before.

It had impressive results – so why was it not picked up by the rest of the LEA’s – go figure!

And finally Sir Ken Robinson on Schools, education and creativity

The 100,000 mile Fireblade

This has absolutely nothing to do with this blog other than the fact that I go everywhere pretty much on my Honda Fireblade.

Last week was simply an historic moment as the numbers 999999 clicked over on my Fireblade as I was zooming up to London. I have ridden in all and every type of weather imaginable and MCN (Motorcycle News) did a little story on me earlier in the year. The reporter who interviewed me said that he had never heard of so many miles done on a sports bike. And here is the little beauty.

In fact, I took this picture because although legally parked in a motorcycle bay, a traffic warden thought that I might have been impeding a footpath, so I got a ticket. Go figure.

Anyway to the glory of all things two wheels with big engines here is an excerpt from a poem that I read as a teenager by the poet Thom Gunn called

On The Move ‘Man, You Gotta Go.’

On motorcycles, up the road, they come:
Small, black, as flies hanging in heat, the Boy,
Until the distance throws them forth, their hum
Bulges to thunder held by calf and thigh.
In goggles, donned impersonality,
In gleaming jackets trophied with the dust,
They strap in doubt–by hiding it, robust–
And almost hear a meaning in their noise

It is part solution, after all.
One is not necessarily discord
On Earth; or damned because, half animal,
One lacks direct instinct, because one wakes
Afloat on movement that divides and breaks.
One joins the movement in a valueless world,
Crossing it, till, both hurler and the hurled,
One moves as well, always toward, toward.

A minute holds them, who have come to go:
The self-denied, astride the created will.
They burst away; the towns they travel through
Are home for neither birds nor holiness,
For birds and saints complete their purposes.
At worse, one is in motion; and at best,
Reaching no absolute, in which to rest,
One is always nearer by not keeping still.

Ask the PM on YouTube

Emma Mulqueeny and I are going to hook up next week – we were kindly introduced by Euan Semple

I was having a a rummage on her blog and came across this.

I want to have a look at this a bit closer – but it looks interesting. I then went over to Samizdata to see what they had to say on the PM -

Samizdata on Gordon Brown

None-the-less I do believe that we have to find a more grassroots approach to political engagement.

Why?

‘Cause grassroots creates meaning, top-down creates a lot of pissed off people.

Then the question is what are the outputs? The tangible benefits of questions to the PM on YouTube or is it just a talking shop?

Emma has some interesting comments on her blog concerning this.

Living in a participatory culture, we need participatory politics that demonstrates something tangible.

Politics should be about serving the greater good