Life's a Pitch

Yesterday the new batch of graduate students pitched for a place in the CrossmediaLab graduate program. There was some sweat, some anxiety and some stuttering, but all in all the students did good presentations. But now! Now the work starts, sculpting the students into researchers is a painstaking process. I know, I once was a graduate student at the crossmedialab. Frustration, tons of literature and blank sheets of paper (that always seem to be winning the staring contest) are just a couple of the things waiting for them. But as I recall from my own time as a graduate student at the Lab, I learned a lot and I had a lot of fun.

Tagged with: usability, pitch, graduation, social, mobile, Marketing,

Is social media making us less social?

A famous Dutch comedian once said:,, When we invented the calculator, we got worse at calculating. Could it be that because of communication technology we got worse at communicating?”. Making things easier often means we get worse at thing, we need to practice. Our brains need the exercise to tackle more difficult problems later on. For Example: if you wanted to say something to your auntie, that lives on the other side of the ocean, you’d send a letter. You would think long and hard on what and how to say it. Your brain gets to exercise. You’re being creative. You’re message would hold meaning. Some of this is because the medium used is the letter, which enables you to think before you communicate. And because of the slower pace of life people had time to think about their message. If you’d go to a bar the messages of people would therefore be more thought over. Because people would be used to think before sending their message, at least a fraction longer then now. In making it easier to send your message to someone else and the demand of modern society to react fast, the message becomes less thought through. Communication has gotten more volatile. We see it every day. Combine this with the anonymity of the internet and you’ve got a cacophony of un-thought-through messages. Every moron with an opinion can be part of an intelligent discussion. And smoothly the norm is transformed to; Say anything, anytime, anywhere, anyhow. So the quality of communication has gotten less.

Tagged with: social, communication, social media,

Pandora's Neocracy #1

Let’s not argue over the fact whether Pandora had a box or a jar. According to my source her original container was called pithos. Whatever may be the ultimate truth, as we may learn from Greek mythology, Pandora gave us ills, toils and sickness. And hope. Zeus ordered his friend Hephaestus to create a woman – Pandora – to punish mankind after Prometheus stole the secret of fire. As the story goes, Pandora had been given a large jar [pithos] and instruction by Zeus to keep it closed, but she had also been given the gift of curiosity, and ultimately opened it. When she opened it, all of the evils, ills, diseases, and burdensome labor that mankind had not known previously, escaped from the jar, but it is said, that at the very bottom of her box, there lay hope, good old hope. Apparently, once Pandora understood what had been in her pithos, she quickly closed it.

Tagged with: social, pandora, crossmedia, mobile,