Instagram and Other People’s Shopping Lists.

Since October last year, Instagram has ruled my photograph taking. It’s done what Flickr should have done and what twitpic, yfrog and the like thought they were doing — a simple, single-purpose photo sharing mobile app.

It gets a lot of flak from people moaning about the use of filters, but that misses the point of what it really is. Like criticising twitter for people’s spellings. As a social space, it’s probably my favourite at the moment. It reminds me of the early days of twitter – the days when you followed a fairly small, but diverse, group of people. When you shared ideas – occasionally what was for lunch – and didn’t have to worry about blocking all the SEO spammers or niche retail outlets from Kentucky, or people shouting for attention.

Another short rant about music.

Today is the day that twitter got excited about 4’33″ and the campaign for John Cage to be Christmas number one. I didn’t. I think it’s patronising.

Last year’s success of Rage Against The Machine pipping whoever won X Factor to number one in the corporate sales chart was a fun, if childish, thing. It was a petulant two-fingers to a culture-sapping initiative of recycle and resell, and a man who is just a tiny bit better at exploiting consumers than most people. It irked some people who believe in the charts and the divine right of destiny an X Factor winner has, but they could still enjoy the song. 

It was funny the first time.

Old Spice, Worn Leather & New Balls.

In case you missed it, yesterday was a good day for The Internet.

Most brands’ social media forays have been either one-sided (e.g. Skittles skinning on top of twitter, flickr, Facebook) or dismissive, leaving it to interns or junior marketing execs to man their twitter account or facebook profiles. This has reaped pretty awful rewards in the past, Habitat finding themselves the focus of a twitter hashfork campaign for their dreadful spamming of #iranelection.

Social Media and Branded Content have been around a long, long time, but there are still only two main models for Branded Content: the seventy-year old television model of product placement and the Nescafé / Oxo Family episodic adverts.[1] There are exciting blurring of both of these, but they’re the basic tenets. It’s unadventurous, obvious and demanding. That’s the main problem. Television has grown up as an activity, a communal appointment with a programme that demanded attention.

The web has so much content, it is stupid to demand attention. The shift in culture from blogs to twitter shows how our attention flits, aiming to consume as much information as possible. An hour-long weekly webseries is not going to win. Quick, personal, short-form content wins.

Old Spice wins.

My Life As A Chopper

“Would you be an object for a week?”
“Yeah, sure.”

That’s how it starts. A flippant enough request, an equally flippant answer, but quite complex in reality. The brief was fairly wide — be irreverent and avoid any particularly brutal single entendres.

As part of My Life As An Object, I was asked by Rattle to voice an object on twitter. The rationale for the project is better explained on Frankie’s blog, but the core aim is to take static exhibits, bring them and their history to life — to make them part of living culture again. This partially meant to make the objects ‘real’ again, to recontextualise them and engage people in a way that you can’t just by looking at them. Most people are used to talking to objects, but not many really expect an object to talk back to them.