‘Think Different!’ The persistent road to an Apple-profiled ‘One Man Hurricane’.
It’s all about values, all about values. Not what uber age group (18–35 years) you belong to, or even culture, but self expression. What get’s to you. What you believe in.
Steve Jobs says it eloquently here described by this YouTube uploader as the ‘best marketing strategy ever’. Meanwhile, Daniel Yankelovich, a leading psychoanalyst and social scientist, explains in depth in the BBC documentary Century of Self, from 2.24.03 onwards. Of course I didn’t know all of this then, but it’s something that had me thinking.
Why were Apple Inc, and some great people I’d met (Stuart et al), wanting to know my thoughts in a 1000-word profile piece on their website
( full Apple article here)? They then asked me to present at their London store, three different times.
You can be King T’Challa all you like, dropping unflinchingly out of a flying whats-a-ma-call-it and taking on bad dudes, but when one of the mothers of tech points her index finger at you, you freeze. I froze. There! It was both exhilarating and bloody unnerving — imposter syndrome at its most intense.
It’s 2008, but truly feels like yesterday in part because of something that happened at the beginning of the year, and don’t we just love celebrating events with rounded numbers, 10 years, 50 years and 100 years etc.
How it might have started
I had ten years of working in digital since 1998. Ten years prior to that I was oscillating across television, radio and an earlier Internet. Necessity truly was my mother of invention. Over the years finding work was difficult, debilitating and tortuous. So much background noise.
Every rejection led to me learning a new skill or doing the strangest of things. My hero and I don’t say this enough is my Dad, who’s passed. Dad always dressed in a suit and was a 24/7 never-ending business man. In Ghana, when we lived together, he’d fly off to unfamiliar territories to do business with locals. I’m only now realising what he did in the face of many odds. “If it’s not working for you, create your own way,” he would say.
It wasn’t working for me. Back in the UK, I had so many rejection letters I filled my room with them as wallpaper. But then I did it. I looked at where there was conflict, a problem, where I could invest the time and curiosity to learn. I bought a plane ticket and with only one person I knew by letter was ready to relocate to South Africa. In South Africa, that old adage ran true. When people were fleeing danger, I was heading into it. Apartheid, legalised discrimination between blacks and whites was on its last legs. And I ran into lots of trouble. Years later, I wanted to cut my own films to tell people my stories. A new generation of 3G Powerbooks would become my haptic device.
Apple’s profile was flattering and took me by surprise. Perhaps it wasn’t so unusual after all. By now I had passed Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule, or equivalent, for building excellence into the thing we want to master. The most difficult thing in becoming the person you envision is staying in the game. I’d been on national television as a reporter, had made documentaries — one on Apartheid whilst living in South Africa played on air one day before their historic election in 1994 — the only non-South African to have that privilege. And back in the UK, together with 30 other youngsters we were chosen by a newspaper going into cable to show the future of news in videojournalism.
The years that followed, I slugged on sometimes having difficulty making ends meet. I’d won several international awards, collapsed several disciplines into one from coding and interactivity to digital news and media making, spoke at a host of international conferences, and trained, amongst others, the BBC, FT.com and regional newspapers in the UK, US and Lebanon to name a few places.
I was beginning to feel confident talking about scenarios in the future that combined my experiences and love for tech and future trending — partly too as a result of my training as a maths and chemistry grad, crunching numbers and working through experiments.
If as a videojournalist you could hive off video to produce different elements for a podcast, film or website, was that so radical? Sixteen years ago it was. ‘Would we really become brands?’, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour would ask me at the popular London Front Line Club. ‘Unequivocally, yes!’ I said.
If we can garner a following, and in the absence of YouTube (it was yet to become a sensation), why not? I had a small following myself courtesy of the New York Times linking to my work.
Much, very much has changed from 2008 to 2018. In media, tech and in ourselves as self-appointed scions, and there’s an uncertainty whether having wished for all of this, we haven’t created the same tiered system we were trying to democratise. Hello Steemit community, maybe this is the nirvana I’m truly after. Otherwise have we truly found solutions for making our lives better? I’m not sure many saw it coming, though I worked through two major startups in the dotcom era 2000. Business protocols would unravel and no one, but no one, would have THE panacea.
Like the ancient symbol the ouroboros or uroborus many of us are chasing our tails, playing through scenarios as if they’re fresh, but in fact oblivious that they’ve surfaced in some guise before.
There are three main areas for the purpose of this post that I want to address drawing from my experience, skills and PhD.
Journalism, Politics and Communications: If you keep on doing what you’re doing, you will continue to get what you got. The post truth era upon us is not entirely new. It may seem that way because we live in the here and now. In the late 19th/ early 20th century Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst had it out with fake news. What, in part, got journalism a reprieve were standards and frameworks to cope with the onset of a new discipline called PR — previously called propaganda. We’ve discarded history as a guide for our folly, and become susceptible to an inevitability of constructs. What big business says must be correct. Today, it requires an overhaul and a multidisciplinary approach which breaks out neuroscience, psychology, cinema, philosophy, digital anthropology, in what I call cinema journalism to make meaning of events.
In their newly published academic-trade book “Reimagining Journalism in a Post Truth World: how late night comedians, Internet trolls, and savvy reporters are transforming the news US scholar/writers edmadison and @BenDJduck, from evaluating my work give cinema journalism credence, citing my approach as “Trailblazing”. Yesterday I spoke to 300 15-year olds about how they should be learning through these disruptive, unreal at times confluence of information packaging, just as they might Shakespeare. One student snap chatted the other with this message.
Diversity and Inclusion. The same old story, but the #BlackLivesMatter movement took a different tack. They were unapologetic as an advocacy group and to date, whilst it’s not a measure of change, Twitter registers their retweet/ hashtag as one of the biggest spikes ever used on their platform. My point here too is that if we’re searching for a different way of doing things, it starts with the self- a Descartian quality of examination. Information exchange is not free from the values of the person relaying it. There’s something indicative, which I spoke of in a recent post that suggests different people to you can never replicate the experience you believe you and your audience desire. In my case collaborating with Simone Pennants we found a creative cost-effective way of publicising the impact of diversity as a point for celebration. The Secretary of State for Culture Rt Hon Matt Hancock MP called it “inspiring”. Its impact is yet to be fully unfurled for the next gen.
Learning and education: I lament deeply that, with what experiences we may have absorbed in start-up cultures, we can’t seem to shift those into the learning environment in academia for the next generation. Hence, we still measure our students by tying their learning to modules, often as ‘gotchas!’. That is no way to prep the next gen for the world. What we need to accelerate is real world experiences. I’m currently working on a project with one of the most innovative groups in the UK, The Guild of Entrepreneurs. These are some of the UK’s top businessmen and women and they’re working with my MA students. Slowly, gradually, the students are realising that business, the world, and hence learning can be a rubik’s cube in 4D. Entrepreneurs are serial doers, laser-focusing on tasks again, and again, and again — each time innovating. It’s a special gene and they’re passing this onto students. There is no magic bullet. For me the very act of learning and failing, say, to produce a prototype artefact for assessment, is in itself success, because you’ve acquired knowledge of pitfalls to avoid for next time. This approach will make our next generation more resilient, aware and prepared to, when appropriate, take neccessary risks.
My ambition now is to rekindle my Dad’s thoughts, to work with individuals, companies and other institutions to realise ideas and more.
At the beginning of this year, ten years since Apple’ tech signet, I took up a Visiting Professor post at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. I had the time of my life with staff and students
Then US-based Michael O’Connell podcast, It’s All Journalism allowed me 40 mins to speak about my craft of Cinema journalism, captured here.
These accolades and signets now mean more than emblems worn on our sleeves and which once made me uncomfortable. They are nods to do better, share more, and engage more wildey and I have lots of unfinished business.
In 2006 The Economist picked up on an idea of mine speaking about hypervideo. Now with AI and working with IBM this can be realised in ways that will have a profound impact on comms and I so want to speak to you about the inspiring lessons of my great dad.
At the Leaders’ List — an event celebrating diversity. You can read more about it here.
