da Scriffles

Just because we can, does it mean we should? This was a philosophical question raised at the X/Media/Lab conference last week at the Sydney Opera House.

Just because you can record your sexual prowess on a website – the number of times you get it up, the times of the day or night when you’re at your sexual peak etc – should you?

Writer/journalist Anand Giridharadas tickled everyone's fancy with a little afternoon delight - there's a website called bedposted.com . 

 This became the running joke for every speaker who followed. 

The ABC was there, The Edge from the State Library of Queensland was there, a party from QUT’s Creative Industries was there too.

X/Media/Lab has become a major event for anyone interested in digital media.

The stellar line-up at last week’s event at the Sydney Opera House included Robert Tercek, a renaissance man of the entertainment industry; Ralph Simon, founder of the modern mobile entertainment industry (inventor of the ringtone); Fanshake founder Dana Al Salem, who built the Yahoo! Europe team when she was 18 or so years old; and Amin Zoufonoun, Google’s director of corporate development.

Most of them, like China’s Haidong Pan who built a Chinese Wikipedia, stuck to the theme of how do you build an innovative global Media idea into reality.

Google's Amin Zoufonoun quoted World Bank figures to prove his point that the digital economy should indeed warrant closer inspection by investors and governments: for every 10 percent increase in broadband speed there's a corresponding 1.3 percent economic growth. NOTE: no private investors were present at the conference. Well, there was one angel from New Zealand but he didn't raise his hand.

The overall message delivered by most speakers was that digital is a new ballgame but it’s the same game. Digital businesses need to solve a real-world problem, or tell a compelling story, and do what they do well to be successful.

Ralph Simon, who flew in from South Africa where he worked on the World Cup, identified the key common ingredients of great innovations: originality; a network of believers who spread word by mouth;  adequate seed funding; international connections and a cast-iron belief & persistence. These ingredients apply across the board – not just to digital innovation.

Dana Al Salem identified two tribes. She supported her argument that the more things change the more they really stay the same by comparing today’s GenY and the hippies of 40 years ago.

 Hippies championed free love and so does GenY who are known as the Hook-Up Generation. Hurricane Katrina now//Hurricane Camille then. Glastonbury now // Woodstock then. Virgin Galactic space travel now // Copncorde’s first supersonic flight then. Vietnam War // Iraq War … BP spill // California spill in ‘69. The big difference between the Baby Boomers and GenY?  GenY’s overstimulated so they’re difficult to excite, they love change, they are a tagged species. Hippy freedom didn’t include an acceptance of loss of privacy and a love of exclusivity.

While most speakers talked about how to make money one speaker spoke about the need to create a philosophy to govern digital ethics and life. Anand Giridharadas, the tech columnist for the International Herald Tribune, has been writing a book living in a small, isolated Indian village. And he too came to the realization that the digital era has not really changed the workings of social networking. The technology’s changed, the platform has changed but it’s still a village where everyone can hear everything that goes down through paper (or grass) walls. 

He calls it ambient sociability. He says it’s something old wrapped in something new. Giridharadas says the internet is not a rootless, new phenomenon without precedent, it’s all the bickering, praising, coming and going that makes up life in a traditional village. But he suggests that there are more challenging areas than marketing and economics that the digitally enabled society has to solve. There’s a question of civility, universality and transparency. Issues such as how much anonymity is too much? Should people be held accountable for their online actions with the introduction of a persistent digital identity?

What happens to honesty and personal integrity when people, being conscious of the image they project online, start to edit themselves to make their personal brand more palatable? Does that kind of self marketing turn people into liars?

He ended on this note:

“We need to figure out the shape of the life we wish to lead and ask how all these magnificent, dangerous ones and zeroes can be put to the task.”

 “How do we evolve a digital philosophy? What would it look like?” Just because we can, does it mean we should?

"We will remake our future so it is as beautiful as our past, but to take this path we need to prepare ourselves, discipline ourselves and believe in ourselves. If we have to start again, working in the sand, with dedicated teachers, then so be it."

The former Australian of the Year (1992) was the first Aboriginal to become a school principal.

I didn't know that until I Googled him. I knew he founded the band Yothu Yindi.

Love this song which was co-written with Paul Kelly: Treaty (1992 Best Song of the Year ARIA)

These guys are basically cultural superheroes in Australia - or were once. They even got a treaty promise from then Prime Minister Bob Hawke.

Of course, it didn't happen. The Australian Constitution is a fearful creature which assures the Constitutional Monarchy, Massive Government and well, I suppose they did manage to change it to recognize the Aboriginal people as citizens in 1967. 

Yothu Yindi's song was a powerful political statement that resonated in the hearts and minds of many Australians - perhaps a band of "illegal asylum seekers" or "queue jumpers" (Joke! I see them as refugees if they have a legit claim to asylum) should put out a hit song, hey? I'm sure Channel Ten's Australian Idol could feature them in their upcoming season - or even Seven's new talent X Factor. 

Culture actually makes culture - it's organic. Politicians they react to culture and if people feel fear it's easy to fear monger than to allay fears - isn't that how WWII started?

It's amazing the impact poets have on a society - if there's no poetry in a person there's probably one hell of a lot of arrogance and ignorance.

There's a lot of poetry in Galarrwuy Yunupingu - and he learned his ABC's drawing the alphabet with a stick in the sand!

 On the weekend, he wrote a column in the Weekend Australian about education which contains some really good power points.

Pity the newspaper didn't put it up online so I could link to it.

I'll just quote a few lines.

He starts:

"The first time I heard the word "school" I was about seven, living with my extended family on the Gove Peninsula in the Northern Territory under the strict eye of my father. I spoke no English and knew no white people."

He goes on to explain how he only went to school out of respect for his father who decided that it was as necessary to learn the white man's language and culture as it was to maintain his traditional heritage and language.

Yunupingu explains how his father was taking his lead from an ancestoral hero named Ganbulabula who made a habit of looking up and to the future.

I don't know but this sounds like a worthy kind of Australian hero to me - don't you think? I think that as we head to a national election politicians generally should keep these few things in mind as they formulate the words they speak and policies for our future.

At the recent X/Media conference I attended there was an Indian entrepreneur, a former journalist, who is busying himself with building a comics/animation studio that produces native stories about the superheroes from their ancient culture. 

Gotham Chopra's Liquid Comics is collaborating with the likes of John Woo and Guy Ritchie, Nic Cage and Hugh Jackman in a fight against terrorism - yes you heard me!

He explained how as a TV journo a few weeks before 9/11 he was in Pakistan visiting an Islamic school to talk to the Imam about whether the fears of the West were justified. The school had a large poster of Osama Bin Laden on the wall. Chopra was on a plane bound out of New York when the planes struck the Twin Towers. His plane was diverted and he made his way to Ground Zero to cover the story and then help out as a volunteer.

But it was something he saw in Pakistan which made him think: Where the hell was Superman? He could've stopped this.

He had talked to a student, a boy who was wearing a Superman t-shirt, at the school. And the Imam then answered his question about whether the West need fear with another question.  "Who do you think should be afraid of who?" - he was referring to cultural domination as an act of terrorism against their heritage.

And so Liquid Comics was born.

Galarrwuy Yunupingu laments, not disbanding Yothu Yindi but the disbandment of his school which deprived people in his homeland the opportunities he enjoyed to stay home and be educated in both English and Gumatj. He ends his column with these words of hope:

"My father's vision will be renewed at this year's Garma Festival which starts on August 6 at Gulkula near Nhulunbuy. The theme is "looking up to the future".

"We will remake our future so it is as beautiful as our past, but to take this path we need to prepare ourselves, discipline ourselves and believe in ourselves. If we have to start again, working in the sand, with dedicated teachers, then so be it."