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Speaking loudly in a Public Place & The art of conversing sustainably.

28 Monday Nov 2016

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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80s Casuals, BREXIT, cars, Class War, Education, fashion & Beauty, Fotball, gene Pool, Genetics, Golf, Harry Enfield, Hilditch & Key, Holidays, Identity, Living The Dream, Llandeilo, Macclesfield, MAMILs, mobile, Notting Hill, Petworth, Prince Regent, Rugby, Semi Detached, Sex, Skiing, Sustainability, Tacchini, Tech, Trainspotting, Trump, Withal & I

19af089861d58143e7bcffbf177b0f51.jpg.png

Love us. We just can’t help ourselves.

For all the homespun wisdoms and studies around how being more socially aware of, sensitive to and inclusive of those around us creates a more resilient society, we just can’t help banging on, sounding off, shouting out, and blahing about  – loudly, relentlessly and shamelessly – about us, us, us.

There’s a touch of Blackadder’s Prince Regent’s about us.

In Blackadder the Third, Sense and Sensibility, Rowan Atkinson’s eponymous butler is trying to coach Hugh Laurie’s roaring roistering and very shouty Prince Regent in the art of public speaking, unhelpfully aided by two ‘actors’.

‘Unaccustomed as I am to speaking loudly in public place…’.

Yup. That’s us.

We’re simply oblivious to the cascade of fog horning we actually do. Or simply don’t care.

Perhaps it’s all part of our genetic makeup. Not happy with our messenger genes working furiously, invisibly, silently on our behalf, perhaps we need to openly trumpet our superiorities and assert ourselves on something, anything, to demonstrate our fitness for gene pool ascension. A sort of oral chest beating. A belt and braces approach to social assertion.

We’ve certainly got plenty of topics to choose from with which to do it:

  • Holidays (boutique off beat long haul 6 star glamp “please find me interesting” and package all-inclusive entertainment included “… but it’s great for the kids…” meets the urbane city break couple with an ironic burlesque trapeze in their suite)
  • Homes ( and the whole region meets post code fascism thing that goes with them  -you know who you are London)
  • Fashion & Beauty (naked stripped back Paraben and orang-utan free meets hi bake crusted fake slathered super gloss with a centre ground of super-drugged over doses of buy 3 get none free )
  • Cars (muscle car versus hot hatch versus electric versus petrol head versus bike versus Classic versus Zip)
  • Sex (socially this is open season – from “euughhh no thanks!” princesses and the blank-eyed cote d’Azur lizard lover to semi-detached Tudored, Tweezered and GoPro-ed all-in wrestling and Breezer bus-stop procreation)
  • Education – (Toffs going state-side leaving the Publics to the oligarchs and bankers , the rise of the Old grammar, and the Churchy state scrum versus post code lottery shitsville Secondary in an over-pressured catchment area kind of thing)
  • Sport (especially things like Golf and Formula 1 – but Rugby versus Football is good for a class fight – but then so is Union versus League – yikes – and cycling’s for MAMILs)
  • Technology (is that the latest super triple upgrade diamond encrusted razor thin i-phone meets digital poverty and second hand devices with digital dementia)
  • Drugs (council estate pill heads, skunks and suburban speed freaks rub up against school study stoners and coke horse fashionistas – with a sprinkle of Withnail and Trainspotting for good measure)

There is endless fun to be had for anyone with a Class calibrated slide rule and an eye for an accent, a shabby cuff, an overturned trainer instep in whitest white and a social smoke machine.

All of the above and many more subjects besides can offer multiple signposts to our ability to secure, protect and expand the gene pool – as a mate and provider –  and more importantly, where we think we currently are and hopefully wish to land on the great ladder of Life.

But many of these subjects are impenetrable to most of us in the flow of our accelerated lives – and carry a complex and subtle range of degrees not immediately obvious.

Impact demands some quite bloody and explicit sign posting and you’ve got to pick the right ones if you’re going for the ‘speaking loudly…’ option.

If chosen properly, to suit both the environment and the audience, the best ones can be a source of endless amusement for the seasoned observer are the ones where our social anxieties, bombast and terrors come rolling boldly into view unmasked and unfettered.

Now before we go on and just to clarify, on the technology front, there is of course a whole sub section beyond the basic noisy snobberies and tribalism of who’s got what “look at my device” technology, rooted in a whole new behaviour – that of a Life lived like an open wound on mobile loudspeaker.

Who has not had the unmitigated pleasure of listening to someone blah on in full voice about riveting subjects such as the process of returning the cardigan they bought on sale for £7.39 …but I had to return it  but then I find out that the sticker bar code had rubbed off so I had to go to the second counter, yeah the one across the other side in charge of bar codes, who’s that?…in the background?….ahhhhhh….how is he….anyway, and you wouldn’t believe it they only sent me back to the first one…ooh…he’s always dropping things that boy….and anyway that snooty cow was there you know the one and anyway…bip bip….oh sorry thought the bus was being re routed so anyway they put a bar code on it and scanned and then the machine woudn’t w…

SHUT UP!!!!!!

Why anyone thinks that listening to the utter banality and mundanity of them honking on about everything from Cheese and Onion crisps to their bunions holds the slightest bit of interest for anyone else within 20 yards of them beggars belief. Do they care. No. On and on they go. At top volume.

Perhaps fog-horning into our mobile while staring listlessly or sometimes cluelessly out of train or bus window makes us feel more alive, or alternately, less dead, or inert.

Or perhaps we all blah on because we’re afraid of the silence. Silence is very scary. Especially in the glittering noise of our conspicuous consumption world. The Silence gets filled up with stuff like thinking about over-drafts, and unpaid bills, and the car we can’t afford: the person we aren’t. And the fact that your other half seemed to pay far too much attention to old slippery bollocks with the ‘hot hatch’ at the pub AGAIN. Oh no. Fill that silence RIGHT NOW.

Or maybe it’s just a sign that we are lonely creatures relentlessly reaching out with any excuse to just talk to someone about something anything. Nail clippers. The benefits of GREGG’s foot long sausage roll (which to be fair does demand quite a lot of conversation).

Who knows. Anyway. Ear plugs in. Crack on.

So where was I? Oh yes. The deafening hawk, crackle and scrape of social laddering grinding across the room at full volume is a wonder to behold, especially in England, that bastion of crippling class consciousness and the emollient cold eyed Cheshire cat smile of its courtly Norman culture.

Now whether these conversations happen in a semi in a cul-de-sac in Macclesfield,  a terrace in Llandeilo or a townhouse in Petworth, the broad trajectory and oath is the same.

I – the fog horn – being of sound mind and body – shall peak loudly in such terms as to clearly communicate to those gathered within ear shot what level of lifestyle I have, the laissez faire with which I take or leave ‘work’, the shade quality or quantity  of leisure time I have and how I spend it – and ultimately – really really – whether I am, to quote the great Philosopher, Harry Enfield, “considerably richer than yaow”.

 (NOTE: This dynamic becomes doubly interesting with couples who might in the secrecy of a closed conversation or room be accused of marrying ‘below’ or ‘above their station’: as this creates an explicit external dynamic – between the individuals and those outside around them – and the implicit internal one between two people in intimate contact and with an intimate knowledge of each other’s foibles and failings in the class department)

So, for example: hands up who’s sat in a restaurant or bar listening to the rallied ranks cawing about a skiing holiday they have just been on or upon which they are about to embark?

Amazing. It is such a perfect storm of social drama. Which resort? Which slope? Drive or Fly? What grade? Mogul? Age of Youngest on Skis? (since he was 3 months old…Obvs). dangerous off-piste-er? French skier? Snowboarder?

And up diddly up up it keeps going. Heli Skiing. Cloud skiing. Rain Skiing. Skiing across a killer whale’s back juggling a bottle of fizz and a Grey Goose chaser.

“Ohh Jasp, you ARE a just SO fucking OUT THERE”.

The ratcheting upwards of who’s the biggest cock in the skiing conversation is a great example of a topic hijacked by our social and genetic need to assert ourselves and is a miracle to behold.

And when I use the word ‘cock’ please do not think I am removing the female gender in this. Social climbing and social fog-horning reaches its apogee in the open mouths of some of the women in these conversations in much the same way with the men.

Don’t get me wrong: I really enjoy skiing. I am not terribly good at it. But I have fun. Moving from bar to bar at high speed across snow is a right laugh. But life’s too short to spend more than 15 minutes talking loudly about it. Isn’t it? And let’s be clear. I am not referring in this piece to people who actually really do LOVE skiing. The die-hards any-weather, can’t live without it addicts. I could listen to their stories all day long.

No. I am talking about the people who haul themselves and their families up a collection of slopes every year, more out of social terror for what not doing it might mean to their school run dinner party schtick than the actual pleasure of doing it.

Golf has a similar schtick. Come on. We’ve all witnessed it. The arcane yet very loud golf-speak followed shortly after by ‘the swing’ with invisible iron finished off with a tongue on roof of mouth ball ‘TSCHH” sound  effect. Marvellous. And what’s interesting in the social malaise is that someone using Golf to publicly assert themselves socially may not even realise that someone else might be judging them silently for the fact they actually pronounced the word GOWLF instead of saying GOFF.

(Careful out there. The issue with social ladders is once on them, there tends to be people both above as well as below you. And the same rules apply. ‘Betters’ are like Bosses – everyone has one – somewhere – somehow – even if they are not immediately visible. They are there.)

Christmas is also a mine field of social fog-horning as it allows the social fog-horner to draw string together a whole host of levers and pulleys.

Consumption and exotic gift purchasing. Rare party invitations. Travel – preferably long haul. Higher order experiences. Exceptional distance from ‘here’ (everyday life)

Witness in a Notting Hill coffee shop three women, all American, just at the ordering point, a casual collision while all on their different morning threads – to work, to yoga instructor, to next coffee shop – living the dream, replayed in coffee shops up and down the country at every rung up and down the social ladder.  (You do not need to have a banker for a husband or as a job to pretend that you can live like someone who does. What are credit cards for!)

So the first asks the second:

“So hey, when are you heading out?”

“Oh gawd, we HAVE to go to New York first, some dull party but then up to the Cape, and then straight to Vale as soon as his mother lets us escape. How about you?”

“Yeah pretty much the same. He’s on his got to get away tip at the moment. Dunno. Might go to St. Barts over New year but that’s about it.”

The deafening silence of the third woman is palpable. Both turn to her and one speaks.

“Hey what about you guys?”

VERY LONG PAUSE.

“Well, think we’re going to have to stay put this year what with John’s work …”

BIGGER PAUSE – SILENCE – and she turns to the server.

“…can I get a Grande decaf cappuccino please…”

SHUT DOWN – SMALL COMPRESSED SMILE – OUCH.

The pause and silence is deafening. All the signs are big: really, really BIG – and not in a good way.

The two ladies look at her, shuffle a little, small smiles to each other.

This is uncomfortable. Not this is AWKWARD.

Three large klaxons have sounded above the lady’s head accompanied by flashing neon.

STATUS ALERT – might not be able to keep up/social death/slightly embarrassing

MONEY ALERT – might not be able to afford shiny life this month or year – do we invite her?

JOB ALERT – husband shaky job position or worse – NO ONE stays in London over Holidays.

Hopefully her remarkably over-priced hot, wet frappecrappachaiccinolate will take the edge off the moment. Nothing says Everything is Awesome quite like an over-priced coffee.

That much cow product in one over glazed cup would put most people into a cow coma of dairy proportion – something that I think she may well appreciate at this very moment.

Sometimes things scream louder in public than any raised voice – or should I say sometimes the world of logos and marques SCREAM louder in public that any raised voice but to much the same effect.  And of course there is the collision of semiotics and invisible gesturing that needs to be folded into this.  Social sign posts come in all manner of variants

In one conversation with a very sartorially obsessed man, I noticed the usual scoffing at a large bloke in a Tacchini sweatshirt – 80s Footie Casual FLASHBACK.

The gentleman pointed out that it was a larger than life example of crass status making –vulgar logo bright colours – gaudy etc.

When I mentioned that he and the Tacchini man were no different he looked aghast. The higher order pomposity of him was firmly pricked.

My point to him was this. I ‘knew’ that the shirt he was wearing was from Hilditch & Key. I had one in a similar fabric, French cuff, cut away collar. His shirt SCREAMED Jermyn Street – in much the same way that Sergio Tacchini man’s screamed Wembley Market.

This stuff matters – to everyone. No-one is immune. This stuff – this pointless scrabbling for identity and the scatterings of ‘things’ that prop it up – it’s part of who and what we all are – whether the ascetics of the Sustainability world like it or not.

(To be fair our ability to wield the Luxury Of Conscience as a day job is a massive assertion of status, identity and educational favour in itself – one that few on this planet, even those in the emerged western cultures, can dream of let alone afford to pursue.)

We need to be really careful when we incite people to stop consuming shiny things they can’t afford and that damage the planet.

So, when someone tells me they’ve developed a new sustainability methodology, garnered some new insights or developed a campaign that involves the words or sentiments ‘stop, reduce diminish, lessen’ and all of the other reductive words we use in sustainability communications, I think of all of these people speaking loudly in public places – sometimes shamelessly, sometimes unconsciously but always slightly desperately asserting their social ascension or at its very least their social survival on the ladders of the ‘look at me’ gene pool.

If we stopped trying to mitigate and compress their competitive genetically fuelled need to assert themselves in the world – and equally stopped trying to erase their ‘terrible’ world view (good luck with that)  perhaps we might be quicker to find a language of human resilience in which we can all share and take part – and somehow get more than the usual 7-13% depending on your think tank or academic referencing to give half a crap about how we live and what we consume.

NOTE This piece was sparked by my reading yet another recent and of course exhaustive Sustainable Lifestyles White Paper Report while sitting in a pub in East Sussex populated by a rather noisy cross section of society.

They were all outwards and upwards – celebrating their very survival in the game called life. They were all at the end of their week, sweeping grumps and whines away with pints and wine and thoughts of pies, curry, pizza, pork scratchings, or clubbing and gear followed by lie ins, golf, swimming, mountain biking, shopping, shooting (birds not films), movies, football, rugby and then what form of Sunday they might have before the shitty bitty day job and weekly worries heaved back into view.

I can safely say that not one of them was at any juncture discussing climate change, acidification of the oceans, human suffrage or equality and diversity – and until we find a way or theme or thread that brings these conversations into the pub meaningfully and without sounding like the Vibe Killer has just turned up  – we’ll stay on the margins wondering how ‘terrible’ things like BREXIT TRUMP and the rest of the sorry shower of deniers and their master plans manage to get the thumbs up in this world  

#voom, voices & the murmurations of the twitterati

31 Tuesday Mar 2015

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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#voom, A.I., beauty, Communications, desire, dynamic data, ecosystems, entrepreneurship, flocking, geolocation, mobile, murmurations, nature, Old Street, ornithology, phenomena, pitch to rich, recognition, Social, social brand, social mapping, Social Purpose, starlings, Twitterati, Virgin Media Business, voice

Screen Shot 2015-03-31 at 10.11.37

There’s something rather magical about the fluid shape shifting phenomena of social media.

And it has reached far beyond the slangy codified data dynamics and scale numbers thrown around Old Street hot desks of doing.

Dependent on the context and the lens through which you view them, there is something truly phenomenal in the surges swoops and sweeps of the numbers and the geophysics of how where and when they occur

Having just launched the Virgin #voom/Pitch to Rich campaign (not personally of course but as one of a very large team) I have started to view social phenomena through this lens and things are looking quite beautiful. And revelatory.

The staggering social reach and the dynamics of flocking in the social media networks around the campaign and some of the numbers being achieved (45.2 Million social media reach in 6 days-ish) has for me stretched far beyond the need for collective nouns.

(How the #voom/pitchtorich campaign reached this scale of impact is a much larger thing to consider. But the finger points to the spirit, mood, exceptional impact and revelatory nature of the Branson films Bruce Goodison of Sundog Pictures created from the various pieces of paper and email chains – supported by some leading media thinking and doing across a substantial number of interrelated and interdependent media channels, partners and audiences)

The wave of furious activity #voom/pitchtorich has inspired in the social networks bears a closer look. The irony is that the further back you stand the closer you can observe the ‘nature’ – the physical virtual dynamics – of its social phenomena.

Originating in a clumsy joke of mine about twitter and birds flocking – I slowly came to the quieter joke of murmurations of twitterati. I am always astonished and in awe of murmurations of starlings. There is an ‘otherness’ to them – as if they are in thrall to a different dimension of existence – to the magnetic turbulences and older forces at work in the world that remain otherwise unseen.

It is also incredible to think that we as humans get to observe them in ways they will never know from the white heat heart of their furious purpose.

Perhaps the same is true of ourselves in relation to our virtual otherness and the collective behaviours and actions in which our virtual selves participate.

I have always sensed that the shape shifting mass of a murmuration carries its own ‘voice’ within it; a relentlessly changing imprint of cadences, inflections; sharp punctuations and sublime emphasis – an ornithological oratory written across the sky.

It then occurred to me that if we mapped our social murmurations – by numbers and actions across time and space we could perhaps visualise our own greater voice carried within them.

For example if there was a social campaign that could be plotted not only by number of participants (flock) but by intensity (altitude) geolocation (topography) and time (horizon) – perhaps we could create animated murmurations of social phenomena.

If we could do that we could then perhaps study the patterns and nature of them in much the same way that we study sound waves and voice recognition patterns.

And perhaps with the wider ambition of attribution, we could begin to recognize traits and characteristics in each pattern that helps us to define the real voice at work and its source and integrity.

Just a thought that I would love to explore a little more.

SUPERDIGICALORIFICTXTMEAPPITROCIOUS! Supersize living &; the rise of digital obesity.

15 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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brand futures, Digital living, mobile, social brand, supersize me

Image

Speed of Life is a wonderful thing. Progress, and the inexorable march of on line living, technology and the sprawling social networks that have come with it, has slung shot those who can afford it into a 21st century filled with an endless stream of content for the highly emerged and highly demanding Right Here Right Now digital citizen.

It’s not hard to see why Businesses and brands desperate to stitch themselves into the fabric of the new consumer consciousness have come to see leaping into this new digital wonderland as a magic answer, inspiring, resolving and delivering all of their dreams, issues and woes at once.

Digital ‘stuff’ can illuminate and expand brand presence, overcome budgetary and operational challenges and polyfill inadequacies all in one shot. Genius. What’s more the captive audience is awesome. There’s a heaving mass of relentlessly connected creatures out there superglued to one device or another, as brilliant as the 3D graphics on our android touch screen and as unlimited as our mobile package, bound in an electric cat’s cradle of joined-up-ness.

And in a world where People talk to people; machines talk to buildings; homes talk to owners; bus-stops chat to commuters, cams speak to police stations, clouds speak to cables and ideas speak to reality through 3D printing technology, the opportunities for businesses and brands to inveigle themselves are seemingly endless.

Our kaleidoscopic ability to multi-task our multi-life and its many personas, searching a holiday, gaming, booking a table, sending an email, grabbing three music downloads (illegally of course) while txt avoiding a tricky mother and recently downgraded BF between wi-fi hotpots presents a wonderland for every experience, service, product and platform designer, innovator and engineer out there.

For a business looking to:

  • build an authentic meaningful and differentiated social brand
  • Improve Reputation and NPS scores
  • stimulate appropriate and meaningful innovation that creates and captures real value
  • move from a bought media to earned media model
  • embrace the game changer mechanisms and communities of the not for profit social entrepreneurial brands

this new rich dynamic and fluid world with its social networks, causal platforms apps, communities of interest and endless playgrounds of content offers a host of opportunities and an infinite number of occasions at which a business can create added value, improve customer centricity and reach a new audience from a myriad number of angles and directions.

The only issue that faces them seems to be that of deciding which conversations to join, who to love up and where to aim the super rainbow gorgeous gun of digital first.
Even the Newtonian truth of our shiny new gig-enabled universe seems to offer salvation and an opportunity to do a Cloud worth of more Digital ‘stuff’.

The toxic underworld that doesn’t feature in the Unlimited Me brochures – the quite unpalatable opposites to our electric speed of life can be turned into a positive in our newly connected world.
A number of businesses and brands have already seized on aspects of the digital distemper:

  • The loss of real human connection and community
  • The dislocation of the poor and the elderly
  • The rise of cruel digital anonymity – e.g. cyber bullying and sexting
  • The collapsing quality of content at ever increasing speed and volume.
  • The as yet unanswered question heavy mobile use’s potential to micro-wave our brains

turning them into the gift of a higher purpose beyond profit for the brand or business, taking them up as a new causes to fight, using the networks and platforms to play out off set strategies for social cohesion, volunteering schemes and outreach projects, delivering apps that donate and micro-fund community action and real impact, and galvanizing employees on and off line to ‘give back’

 But there is a danger in this Bad Into Good model for me. Because I believe it has the potential to disguise or wholly obscure the exacerbation of a far more insidious malaise – the one thing I believe presents the only truly equal and opposite force to that positive powering our hi-speed digital lives – the condition of digital obesity.
We are, in digital terms, becoming morbidly obese – and businesses and brands asserting their digital persona in the world will only make the condition worse.
To grasp some measure of the potential ‘tonnage’ of digital stuff coming our way in the not too distant future, one only has to look at the seismic budgetary shifts in both marcomms investment from traditional to new media channels and in operational emphasis to online customer retail and service models.
And as with their friends in the fast food retail sector, businesses and brands cannot simply lay the responsibility for healthy levels of consumption at the door of those consuming it.
In our supersize-me digital world they have engineered a plethora of ever greater choice – a curse that we seem incapable of undoing or casting off for fear of not being or being seen to be ‘connected and ON’.
We’re in an endless lock-in at the All You Can Eat big byte buffet and we’ve eaten the key.
We are becoming increasingly immobilised by our mobile selves, screeching to a halt mid stride, sentence, hump or sleep to answer the seductive vibration and ping of another pointless digital missive.

We are stuffing our faces with gigabytes of links, looks and lazy emotion to the point of nausea.

We are increasingly crippled by the devices sitting in front of us, paralyzed by the mere thought, let alone the actual loss, of power or connection. We sit slumped in bars watching the bars on our mobiles flicker in and out of range. We find ourselves frozen in silhouettes, stupid people holding smart devices to the sky, some half open window or the door in some desperate search for connectedness and meaning.

More and more of us are quietly and invisibly suffocating under the sheer weight of our fabulous unlimited-ness – rolled in fold upon fold of multiple personas, accounts, passwords, profiles and the multitude of screen devices that serve them. For some, digital citizenship is crushing, both physically and spiritually – a crisis of wellbeing.

We are getting less emotional bang for our digital buck – becoming spiritually diminished by the ever increasing and relentless consumption of the over illuminated text of content, connection and correspondence – the Windows to our soul now come with a Microsoft logo seared into the lids.

There is even a nihilistic dimension appearing; with grown adults oppressed by the SKY Plus listings – the endless chore of deleting all the things they will never have time to watch delivering a harsh reminder of their own mortality. There is no 27 Hour Day App you can tap to make it alright

People in business are doing less with a 24/7crackberry habit than they did by walking down the office floor and only answering calls in office hours. We now manage tsunamis of emails playing pass the parcel and administrating the professional persona we want the world to see, not who we are or what we’re really worth.

Even at our current level, If bytes were calories some of us would quickly become the lead feature in a tatty real life story magazine with larger than life pictures of our larger than life body now unable to leave the chat-room other than by crane and low loader HGV once some walls have been removed.
We are indiscriminately consuming supersize portions of content and correspondence at greater speed and greater volume than ever before and to such a degree as to create the very opposite of the nirvana our interconnected togetherness promises.

Both we in our digital neediness, and the brands and providers that serve it are driving a culture of digital consumption that is both overwhelming and unsustainable – and ultimately destructive.

We are becoming immune to massive deliveries of every type of content, our hunger becoming harder to satiate, the digital version of a stomach stapling lying just around the corner for some of us.

And this immunity will only in turns frustrate and further inspire the brands and businesses seeking our favour to double their efforts and outputs.

We need divine editing and de-selection tools, not another shed load of low quality tat shoved down our pipe – a role that businesses and brands could well embrace to amazing effect on both their constituencies and their reputations.

It is the responsibility of any business that is considering or already peddling and utilising the digital fix to authentically embrace to a greater degree the role of divine editor physician and life coach on the behalf of societies they thrive within.

So perhaps, the next time the strategists and consultants both inside and outside your business are assessing the value of wrestling with the muscular ‘cut’ colossus of our godlike digital selves, standing astride the world wrapped in electric pixel pants packed with gigabyte greatness, they should spare a thought for its troubled twin, stuffed into ill fitting velour sports leisure wear, sweating and wheezing, roll after roll of uncontrolled content pouring over the top of its go-faster waistband as it shuffles at a snail’s pace to the supersize fridge of byte-size snacking on its collapsing peta flip-flops.

In pursuit of exploring the edges and impacts of digital obesity I would invite the sharper and more inquisitive brand and business minds out there and the big brains who serve them to get out the weights, measures slide rules and calipers and get to work on a truly transparent assessment of the situation.

Social and digital strategists both on the operational and the brand sides of business must honestly consider the more toxic downsides of our digital brilliance. They should pass a colder eye over the subtler psychiatric impacts of the nihilistic nature of our consumption when plotting a new digital dimension, otherwise they are not representing the potential for impact both good and bad that the digital virtual world has to offer.

Only then could we all leap into this amazing new world with a clear understanding of what we are getting ourselves into and what a sustainable and healthy digital citizen really might look like.

FOOTNOTE

An abridged version of the above featured in the Guardian Sustainable Business last April:

http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/digital-obesity-high-tech-health

and featured as a theme in the UK Dream Wellbeing workshop I facilitated. It has subsequently been picked up the University of Surrey as a potential 4 year research piece – Digital Divinity and the search for an enlightened digital life – in search of a top up corporate sponsor.

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