The Big Society

by

Hey, I made a film today

I, too, am now a film maker.

It’s always been an ambition of mine to make a film. A proper movie with characters, script, dialogue, a beginning and an end. Ok, I still haven’t done it. But with the help of YouTube I have moved closer to it.

www.YouTube/create

This week with a colleague from Zerofiftyone I attended the Social Media Summit 2011 in Holborn along with around 200 other adherents of new media.

www.thesocialmediaacademy.co.uk

All of us twittered away to our hearts’ content before, during and after the conference. A friend of mine, Ben Lancaster (#benlancaster), picked up a tweet that said I was in Holborn and working around the corner suggested meeting for a pint.

We repaired to The Gunmakers in Clerkenwell (13 Eyre Street Hill, Clerkenwell EC1R 5ET – www.thegunmakers.co.uk). It, too, is social media savvy and had picked up a tweet from Ben that we were coming and welcomed me by name as we entered. The pub now follows me on Twitter (#thegunmakers) and I follow it. It worked, as the next day in the same vicinity with different people I went there again. By then it felt like home. Ok, better than home..

The Conference was  brilliant. An array of great speakers followed one after the other. YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare. Among the best was Bruce Daisley, who is Sales Director for YouTube & Display UK.  In June 2010 New Media Age awarded Bruce ‘The Greatest Individual Contribution to New Media’. 

He has worked in radio, spends his days selling open video as a medium and he uses humour to great effect. What’s not to like?

He delivered a disarmingly humorous talk rich in content and insight that started with a large knitted video screen of a Google home page with a space in it for Bruce’s face, which he obligingly placed in the hole.  His Grandmother had knitted it for him.  The audience, won over, obligingly disappeared into his pocket. After a few serious points, he played a succession of videos that show how YouTube is becoming a mainstream search engine platform. He is a passionate evangelist for video and convinced the audience that it is worth exploring. Consider these points:

  • Video creates engagement with your community
  • ‘The most creative communities are those that cultivate the greatest diversity.’ (Charles Landy: The Creative City)
  • One-fifth of YouTube traffic comes from Facebook
  • YouTube is the second most tweeted brand on Twitter
  • 20% of consumption on YouTube is via mobile
  • Mobile views trebled over the last year (the iPad effect)
  • Video is creative, stimulating and open as a platform
  • Video is 50% more likely to appear in SEO results

He threw in a gem amongst the humour. YouTube has adopted video processing software online that enables complete novices to create their own short animated films. You supply the dialogue and direct the facial expressions, choice of set and background music which are available in a wide palette of options, ready to go. Aside from slightly mechanical American voices and transatlantic drawl in the on-screen menus, it is possible to create highly sinuous, fluid action clips in less than an hour.

I know. I’ve done it. Using one of the platforms, Xtranormal Movie Maker, I made a short animated film entitled ‘The Floating Voter’ and uploaded it in about fifty minutes last night. Here’s the lowdown: The days are passing quickly before the political event of the Millenium – the Referendum on the new voting system. Two contemporary characters sit in a clean white office in Hoxton debating the issues of the day.

He is using politics as a means of speed dating. He is keen, anxious and supplicatory. She is savvy, cynical and unmoved. They represent the Zeitgeist. They could be you and me…

You can watch it here. It will probably make you laugh.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3fq6Lw7_vM

by

Faith in a Big Society


Faith that we're going somewhere

The Big Society as defined by David Cameron and the new Right puts the wider community ahead of narrow self-interest. Without faith this won’t work.

Faith tells us:

  • That when we flick a switch there will be electricity
  • That paying into a mortgage is an investment in the future
  • That this is not all there is
  • That tomorrow will arrive as usual
  • That the future will be better than the past
  • That it is worth helping our neighbour
  • That we are not just the sum of our chemical components
  • That Society (Big or otherwise) has a future

We negotiate life hoping that the future will bear fruit. Without faith, family planning would be a family gamble. Without faith, we wouldn’t sacrifice for the future – the present would be a cynical, nihlistic pig’s trough of satiated appetites. Nothing to hold onto – or for.

The opposite of faith is worthlessness, helplessness and hopelessness. Or put it another way – despair.

Human Beings need faith

How God changes your brain (2009) / Born to Believe (2006) – Andrew Newberg MD and Mark Robert Waldman

These very astute Psychologists have produced research to show how human beings are wired for a belief in and an antenna for God. Humans need to believe in something. Time spent meditating improves memory and slows down neurological damage caused by growing old. They show that energy spent dwelling on negative thoughts for any longer than 20 seconds starts to damage the physiology of the brain. At Powerchange we call this the 19 seconds theory. Spend any longer than that on bad stuff and it will take ten times as long to repair the damage. Newberg and Waldman argue that we have a God neuron in the brain that expands the more we contemplate spiritual matters. The more we tune in, the better the reception.

Maybe that’s why, for many, God is more of a feeling than an idea. God came to earth because he was lonely and missed us and was prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice in order to get us back. Logically, this seems absurd. Delusional. But there is a wellspring of desire in our hearts that wants it to be true. Faith and hope speak to our hearts more than to our heads.

People with faith tend to live longer, live happier lives, have longer marriages, divorce less and have less illness. Oh yes, and they have fewer heart attacks..

Even atheists think faith is a good idea.

Matthew Parris – ‘As an Atheist I truly believe that Africa needs God’ published in The Sunday Times Dec 28th 2008

“Christianity .. offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.”

Joan McGregor, Professor of philosophy and bioethics at Arizona State University, contends that the mind can influence the body, citing the power of prayer, meditation and social groups.

“We waste a lot of money on drugs and invasive therapies when we could go in another direction,” she says, “We ought to be studying this and harnessing the power of the mind.”

Professor Tor Wager, Professor of Psychology at Columbia University has researched the role of placebo in the human brain:

“The human brain is not like a machine, but like a river with a lot of ongoing processes,” said Wager. “What you do when you give someone a drug is you nudge that and produce all sorts of ripple effects.”

Wager has shown how the neurochemistry of the placebo effect can relieve pain in humans. He found that the placebo effect caused the brains of test volunteers to release more of a natural painkiller.

The placebo effect is an improvement in a medical condition caused by a patient’s belief as opposed to actual treatment.

The human being naturally generates faith in the process of healing. Healing results even when no actual chemical or clinical intervention is made. Our psychology needs faith wired into it. Take it away and illness, darkness and death result.

Why do We Need Faith?

Because jumping over the ledge into the unknown is better than certain death in the burning building.

Even if God were a placebo, we would still keep a packet of him on our person. What Dawkins and the selfish mob fail to realise is that the human race is better off believing in the idea of God.

Take that away and you take away hope.