A real conversation I had yesterday

• May 3, 2012
• 2 notes

- What can I get you?

- What have you got?

- Anything you see here is all we have left.

- That chicken burger looks okay. Can I have that please?

- Oh, no. Sorry. The bread’s gone hard on that. I can’t sell it to you.

- What are you going to do with it then?

- Throw it away.

- Or… you could give it to me. I don’t mind if it’s a bit hard.

- No, can’t do that. 

- But if you’re throwing it out…

- I can’t sell it to you, and I can’t just give food away. I can’t give you stale bread. *crumbles bread in fist to demonstrate staleness* What if you get sick and they ask you where you got it from?

- All right… Well, can I have that piece of lasagne then please?

- Yep. That comes with garlic bread.

- Okay thanks.

- Here you go.

- Umm… this garlic bread is completely stale.

- Yeah, it’s all like that.

• April 10, 2012
• 1 note

Amazing. Very grateful. Thanks everyone.

Jazz in Europe

• March 15, 2012
• 1 note

I’m in meetings today with my Rhythm Changes research project colleagues, talking about Jazz and National Identity. The discussion is about the different research that people have been doing in Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, the UK and so on.

Lots of writing and performing has been going on. My part has been about the way in which National Jazz agencies (Jazz Danmark, Jazz Services UK and so on) use the Internet, and an article about the research project I did with The Kitchen Orchestra in Stavanger.

There are 11 of us around the table, sharing ideas and talking about recordings and releases as well as books, reports and articles already coming out of the project.

The longevity of social objects

• March 12, 2012

How interesting does something have to be to how many people in order for it to become an ONGOING conversation?

There are all sorts of theories about viral videos and the point at which they take off. In fact there’s a whole industry around “making virals” (which is an awful idea, frankly). But that’s not what I’m concerned with here.

I’m interested in Jyri Engeström’s notion of social objects - particularly from the perspective of making things (David Gauntlett’s useful here) but then those things becoming the shared object around which people start a conversation.

But conversations online are often fleeting. They flare up, take hold and then quickly dissipate - but the brighter they burn, the faster they seem to die out.

So I’m interested in the idea that some things become perennial talking points. Things that people continue to think about and bring up in conversation.

Do they have to be complex ideas that require ongoing consideration or simple ideas and catchphrases (“tipping point” for example) that are useful ways of thinking about a range of different problems and situations? Do they need to be urgent and pressing issues (global warming)? Or are there some other shared characteristics - such as directly connecting with personal experience rather than being abstract concepts?

I’m not talking about how memes work, though that’s certainly a related issue. This is more about ideas and talking points that are interesting enough (or important enough) to keep coming back to - and whether there is an intersection between that sort of interestingness and social media.

Coming to a close

• December 17, 2011
• 1 note

I’ve been retiring some services I don’t use recently. I’m out of Spotify, Last.fm, Facebook and a few others. It also occurs to me that I haven’t been using Tumblr very much either. I’m going to keep this account open and I might find a use for it again at some point in the future - but for now, everything’s going on elsewhere.

My personal blog is a good starting point…